As competition heats up for AI talent, Google turned to hiring more so-called boomerang employees in 2025.

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Google hired 20% of its AI software engineers in 2025 from its pool of former employees, marking an increase from previous years as competition for AI talent intensifies. The company leverages its computational infrastructure and resources to attract boomerang employees, including high-profile returns like Noam Shazeer from Character.AI. This hiring strategy follows Google's 2023 layoffs of 12,000 employees and comes amid fierce competition from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, with some companies reportedly offering signing bonuses up to $100 million to retain talent.

Google’s boomerang year: 20% of AI software engineers hired in 2025 were ex-employees

hording up talent is the new market? Seriously?

… until they realise they over hired and lay off 20% of their workforce. Again. 🤨

It’s literally Gavin Belson with Nucleus

you dont need those many people. you need better people with more AI. better AI that is it, more competant ai given to internal workers so they can have a Large bot army, imagine a scaleable google flash army with 50 or 100 bots running at the same time all researching and figuring out the same task and micro parting it out etc. u can do anything in like 5 minutes especially uncapped. id also daisy chain all of the LLMS together all opensource ones to pool their knowledge to build ur products. that is how u win. unstopable with an army of kimi k 2.5bots talking to flash bots talking to deepseek 3.2 bots talking to devstral etc. with knowledge backpacks on them. etc. unstopable bud.