Google’s CEO told employees to expect additional layoffs this year following recent layoffs that affected 1,000 employees.
In a memo to staff on Wednesday, Sundar Pichai said departments within the tech company continue to make changes and “some roles may be affected.”
Pichai’s memo acknowledged further layoffs reported last week, with the Alphabet Union, which represents workers within Google and its parent company Alphabet, announcing that 1,000 employees were affected.
“We have ambitious goals and will invest in big priorities,” he said in a memo reported by technology news website The Verge. “The reality is that we have to make hard choices to create this investment capacity.”
Pichai said the difficult choices so far include job losses at Google’s divisions, which include search, ad sales and the YouTube platform.
He noted that Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs across Alphabet in January last year, and said the job cuts would not reach that level. The company employed 182,000 people as of September 30 last year, according to its latest quarterly results.
“These role reductions are not at the scale of last year’s reductions and will not affect all teams,” Pichai wrote. “But I know it’s very difficult to see your colleagues and teams affected.”
Pichai announced the layoffs last year, saying Alphabet experienced a hiring boom as demand for tech companies surged during the coronavirus pandemic. He acknowledged that the company had overexpanded and wrote that it “hired for a different economic reality” than the one Alphabet faces now.
Pichai’s Wednesday memo was not on par with 12 months ago, when Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and Meta made tens of thousands of layoffs to adapt to the post-lockdown economy, sent to employees against the background of technical layoffs elsewhere. In December, Spotify announced it would cut 17% of its global workforce, while Amazon cut hundreds of employees in its Prime Video and Studio divisions, as well as about 500 employees at live streaming platform Twitch announced that he would be fired.
According to a website that tracks job losses in the technology industry. layoff.fyi, the sector has made 7,785 job cuts globally so far this year. By the same time last year, tech companies had laid off even more employees, about 38,000.
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Pichai said Wednesday that the latest job cuts are focused on “reducing tiers to simplify execution and increase speed in some areas,” with more role cuts to come. Stated.
“While many of these changes have already been announced, we want to say upfront that some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year as needed and some roles will be affected. “There is a possibility that we will be subject to this,” he added.
Google declined to comment.
Source: www.theguardian.com
