It's no secret Google has painfully few black employees. Why lie about it? Laszlo Bock, Google's exceedingly Caucasian vice president of people operations, assured members of Congress last June that Google, which was lobbying for more H1-B visas for immigrant workers, had plenty of black employees. "We have a very strong internal Black Googler Network," he said. "We actually view it as our obligation to reach out to underrepresented communities in our industry, particularly women in engineering, particularly African-Americans. "How many [of Google's employees] are African-American?" asked Representative Maxine Waters.

Yahoo will move its European headquarters from London to Rolle, Switzerland. HR emailed 70 top managers, many of them pictured here, to tell them they have 30 days to relocate or lose their job, according to the Financial Times. The move is supposed to ease Yahoo's tax bill. PaidContent's Rafat Ali thinks the hassle of the move is meant to drive Yahoo European head Toby Coppel out of the company. (Photo by sh1mmer)

Buried in CEO Eric Schmidt's blog post about the company's greenlighted acquisition of DoubleClick:

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey thinks Google executives bring up the free food way too often. What they never mention: How managers make the cooks — contract workers — feel like second-class citizens. Below, an email from Google HR to the Bon Appetit employees who make all that food. The memo, in the words of our tipster, was intended to "let them know that no matter what they think, they will never be as good as or privileged as their Googly overlords."

In our "Googler's vent: working here sucks too" post, commenter tengallonhero does some venting of his own:

A month after we first heard rumors that Libby Sartain, Yahoo's unpopular HR chief, a tipster now tells us Sartain is "quitting." To the last, Sartain has been more skilled at generating press clips for herself than results for Yahoo. In the most recent issue of Human Resource Executive — yes, such a magazine exists — she said:

Shareholders have already figured out Cisco's not meeting expectations. Now employees are feeling it, too. In good times, Cisco employees get a mid-year advance on their annual bonus, paid in March. But managers have just informed their charges that they're getting half the usual amount. Cisco bonuses start off ranging from 4 percent to 60 percent of one's annual salary, depending on pay grade, and are determined by a maddeningly abstruse formula:

A soon-to-be former AOL employee confirms the rumors of mid-December layoff. The holidays are always an embarrassing time to let employees go, but what's worse is the way management delivered the bad news. Our source tells us that "when the brain trusts sent out the holiday party email they only sent it to people who would still be here — even though some of us hadn't been notified we were on the block yet." Dear employee, you're not invited to continue working at the company. Yours cordially, Mgmt.