Leaked memo: Verily is suspending spot bonuses through 2020 and redirecting the money to diversity and inclusion programs
Zoe Schiffer / The Verge : Source: Business Insider .
Context & Ripple Effects
Alphabet's life sciences unit is funding its diversity push out of an existing perk rather than new money: spot bonuses are suspended for the rest of 2020 and the dollars redirected to diversity and inclusion programs. The decision sits at the junction of two memo-driven threads that recur across big tech — compensation being tuned line by line (Zoom's stock-comp pullback, Meta's later bonus multiplier cut from 85% to 65%) and D&I commitments whose durability gets tested.
The long arc matters here: Verily itself went on to lay off ~15% of its staff in 2023, and by January 2025 both Meta had terminated its major DEI programs and Amazon was winding down parts of its own citing a changed legal and policy landscape — making this 2020 reallocation an early data point in a cycle that has since reversed.
First-order effects
- Verily employees give up spot bonuses for the remainder of 2020; the same budget now flows to diversity and inclusion programs instead of ad-hoc recognition pay.
- Alphabet's life sciences unit publicly ties its D&I commitment to a concrete internal funding source, raising the bar beyond statement-only pledges competitors were making that year.
Second-order effects
- Peers face an implicit comparison test: once one company shows D&I money coming from a named perk pool, rivals' unfunded pledges look thinner by contrast — even as the corpus shows bonuses remained a live tool elsewhere, like Microsoft's $1,500 pandemic bonus a year later.
- Routing D&I money through discretionary comp makes the programs vulnerable to the next cost review, since the same lever gets pulled for cuts — as Meta's multiplier reduction and Zoom's equity pullback demonstrate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, DEI funding built on discretionary compensation is structurally fragile: the 2020 reallocation, the 2023 Verily layoffs, and the 2025 Meta and Amazon program terminations trace one arc of corporate priorities tightening.
- Leaked internal memos have become the de facto disclosure channel for compensation and DEI policy, forcing companies to make these calls in public before any official announcement.
The trend: Tech compensation pools serve as the swing lever for shifting corporate priorities — redirected toward D&I in 2020, squeezed in downturns, and largely defunding DEI by 2025.