Pick the Googlers who have to go

I've been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week's earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google's overeager recruiters had brought on board.

If the new guys are so great, though, why stop hiring? Here's a radical idea: Keep on adding new employees, but start ripping out some of the dead wood that's accumulated at the world's most adjective-ridden company.

And with that, I present "Toogle Many Googlers!", a series in which I nominate Googlers who need to be given a gentle push out of the Googleplex. Read on for the first batch of names. Got a nomination? Send it in, preferably with a pic of the victim.

Chris Sacca, Google's "head of special initiatives," with an inflated title and an equally inflated ego, specializes in hot-air projects guaranteed never to go anywhere, and hence, never require any real work on his part. If it weren't for the special halo of protection draped on his shoulders by CEO Eric Schmidt, or so we hear, Sacca would have been given the sack long ago. No time like the present! Congratulations, Chris Sacca: You're the first person Valleywag nominates as one Googler toogle many!

He's already said he's got the world's easiest job. So why not just ease David Lawee right on out of it? With no real background in marketing, Lawee just parrots the same palaver as the rest of the Google gang about how its products market themselves. If they market themselves, bud, why do you have a job? And when he's not reciting those tiresome lines, he brags about how Google's so humble — so humble, he needs to tell you how humble it is five times in a single conversation! David Lawee, if you can take a break from eating humble pie in the Google cafeteria, accept our heartfelt congratulations — you're not just a Silicon Valley Tool, you're also one of Toogle Many Googlers!

It's time for Eric Schmidt to declare victory and move on. Google cofounder Larry Page still talks like a giant dork. But we hear that Page hasn't just upgraded his fashion sense — he's also grooming himself to take back his original role as Google's CEO. As Google's founders grow up, Schmidt's role as Google's so-called "adult supervision" grows increasingly pointless — witness last quarter's unsupervised hiring binge. Declaring himself a surplus Googler will let Schmidt cash out in peace and pursue his real passion: spending time with women who aren't his wife.