Earning nearly $1 million a year wasn’t enough to keep Yousuf Imran at Google.
In 2026, Imran earned $986,000 as a Google account executive, largely from sales commissions on top of a roughly $170,000 base salary. Even still, he couldn’t help but notice the potential for “life-changing money” the AI boom was creating outside Big Tech.
“Google pays very well, but the equity packages at OpenAI and Anthropic are in a different universe,” said Imran, 41, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Meanwhile, seeing talented colleagues get laid off over the previous few years made him less confident about his long-term job security. In April, after building AI side projects in his spare time, Imran left Google to launch an AI sales tools startup.
For years, Google’s reputation as a workplace was almost as famous as its search engine. Its sprawling campuses, generous perks, and the opportunity to shape products used by billions of people made it one of the world’s most coveted employers.
That reputation hasn’t disappeared, but for some employees, it has become more complicated. Interviews with 12 current and former Google employees — including six who recently left the company — suggest the AI boom has created opportunities that have become too compelling for some Googlers to ignore. In recent weeks, the company has lost several high-profile AI researchers to OpenAI and Anthropic.
But the AI boom isn’t the only reason. Years of layoffs, shifts in workplace culture, and other changes have also led employees across the company to question whether it remains the best place to build their careers.
Google no longer feels like the safe bet
Google was the world’s most attractive employer for business students for more than a decade, according to employer-branding firm Universum. But in 2022, it fell to second behind Apple. In the US specifically, Google fell from first among business students in 2023 to fifth in the firm’s most recent survey, though it remained the most attractive employer among IT students.
Few factors matter more to current and prospective employees than job security. Between its founding in 1998 and 2022, large-scale layoffs were rare at Google. In 2023, the company cut about 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of its workforce. Smaller rounds of layoffs and voluntary buyouts followed as Google shifted resources toward AI, reduced layers of management, and recalibrated after pandemic-era hiring.
For some employees, the repeated cuts fundamentally changed how they thought about the stability of a career at Google.
About six months after Joslyn Orgill started as a data engineer at Google, the company announced its 2023 layoffs. Though Orgill kept her job, she said the layoffs were among the reasons she left last year to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science.
Taylor M. LaSane was among the employees who accepted a buyout last year. She had already considered focusing on the career coaching business she’d started three years earlier, but said the repeated layoffs made leaving Google feel less risky than it might have in the past.
Looking for a bigger impact
Google still offers many of the generous perks that helped make it famous as an employer. But some employees say the experience of working there has changed on the margins in recent years.
The company has scaled back some office amenities and budgets, including reducing the hours of certain office cafés in 2023 as part of cost-cutting efforts. Some employees also said budgets for certain travel, team events, and holiday celebrations have tightened, while work-from-home policies have become more restrictive.
For some employees, one of the very qualities that made Google such an attractive employer — its scale and reach — also made it harder to see the direct impact of their own work.
“At a Big Tech company, you’re one piece of a very large machine,” said Aashna Doshi, who left Google in May to launch an AI startup. “I craved the ability to make decisions, move fast, and see the direct results of my work.”
For Doshi, the chance to build something of her own ultimately outweighed the security of staying at Google.
“The scarier version of this decision wasn’t leaving Google,” she said. “It was staying and always wondering what could have been.”
The AI boom changed the equation
Many of the changes reshaping Google aren’t unique to the company. Tech workers across the industry have navigated layoffs, shifting workplace policies, and the rapid rise of AI. For many employees, Google remains one of the most desirable places to build a career in tech.
But as OpenAI and Anthropic race toward potential IPOs, the prospect of pre-IPO equity has become a powerful lure for some workers. Career coach Sundeep Teki previously told Business Insider that nearly every AI job seeker he speaks with wants to work at one of the two companies.
Though some Google employees have voiced frustration over smaller compensation increases, the company’s six-figure salaries and generous stock grants remain the envy of much of the corporate world. A Google spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the company remains confident in its ability to attract and retain talent.
For some former Googlers, however, even Google’s generous compensation isn’t enough to outweigh the opportunities created by the AI boom — whether that’s joining a fast-growing AI company or building one of their own.
“If the only way to get real upside in this AI moment is equity, at some point, you ask yourself whether the equity should be in your own company,” Imran said.
Have a story to share about working in tech? Reach reporter Jacob Zinkula via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29.
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