Sundar Pichai’s memo acknowledges additional redundancies following last week’s layoffs
Google’s CEO has informed employees to brace for more job cuts this year, following a recent round of layoffs that impacted 1,000 staff. Sundar Pichai, in a memo on Wednesday, stated that “some roles may be impacted” as various divisions within the tech company undergo ongoing changes.
Acknowledging the reported layoffs from the previous week, which the Alphabet Workers Union stated affected 1,000 workers, Pichai emphasized the necessity of making tough choices to create capacity for the company’s ambitious goals and investments in priority areas.
Pichai mentioned that the challenging decisions made so far included job reductions in various Google divisions, such as search, advertising sales, and YouTube. Despite emphasizing artificial intelligence as a key strategic focus, with the introduction of Bard and Gemini, he reassured that the current role eliminations would not reach the scale of the 12,000 redundancies across Alphabet in January of the previous year. As of September 30 last year, the company employed 182,000 people, as per its most recent quarterly results.
Pichai acknowledged the difficulty in witnessing colleagues and teams being affected, but assured that these role eliminations would not impact every team. Last year, when announcing job cuts, he attributed Alphabet’s overexpansion to a hiring spree during the heightened demand of the Covid-19 pandemic, admitting they had hired for a different economic reality than the one faced today.
Pichai’s Wednesday memo to employees coincided with ongoing tech layoffs, although not reaching the scale observed a year ago when Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, and Meta executed substantial job cuts, adjusting to a post-lockdown economic landscape. In December, Spotify announced a 17% reduction in its global workforce. Simultaneously, Amazon is undergoing layoffs, including hundreds in its Prime Video and studios units, along with approximately 500 employees at its live-streaming platform, Twitch.
As per data from layoffs.fyi, a website monitoring job losses in the tech industry, there have been 7,785 global redundancies in the sector this year. In comparison, during the same period last year, tech firms had laid off a significantly higher number, approximately 38,000 staff.
Pichai stated on Wednesday that the recent job cuts aimed at “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas,” and further role eliminations are anticipated.
“Several of these changes are already disclosed, but to be transparent, certain teams will persist in making specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year, as needed, potentially affecting some roles,” he added.
Christopher Gilchrist, principal analyst at the research firm Forrester, noted that during times of technological evolution, such as the rise of generative AI, companies like Google have acknowledged that there is a significant shift and a need for adaptation to remain competitive.
