In the most recent record round of tech layoffs, Google owner will eliminate 12,000 workers.
As the economic boom that the sector benefited from during the COVID-19 epidemic ebbs, Google is cutting 12,000 jobs, or approximately 6% of its employees, and is the latest tech corporation to do so.
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Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and the head of Alphabet, the corporation that owns Google, told employees of the layoffs on Friday via email that was also posted to the business’ press blog.
It’s one of the largest rounds of employment cuts the company has ever experienced, and it joins the tens of thousands of other layoffs recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta, and other internet giants as they tighten their belts in the face of a gloomier future for the sector.
Major corporations in the industry have reported at least 48,000 job layoffs just this month.
Pichai stated in his article that the past two years have seen times of “dramatic progress.” We employed people who were prepared for a different economic reality than the one we currently confront in order to meet and fuel that development.
According to him, Google’s operations underwent a “rigorous examination” that is reflected in the layoffs.
Pichai stated that the affected positions “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels, and regions.” He apologized “deeply” for the layoffs.
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Regulatory papers show how the epidemic increased Google’s staff, which rose from 119,000 at the end of 2019 to over 187,000 by late last year.
Pichai claimed that Google, which was established some 25 years ago, was “bound to go through challenging economic cycles.”
He wrote, “These are crucial times to narrow our focus, reengineer our cost structure, and allocate our talent and capital to our highest priorities.” He highlighted the business’s artificial intelligence efforts as a potential growth area.
Pichai’s letter states that there would be layoffs in the US and other unnamed nations.
Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives, Taz Koujalgi, and John Katsingris wrote on Friday that the IT industry has been forced to halt hiring and make job cuts because “the clock has struck midnight on hyper growth and digital advertising headwinds are on the horizon.”
Microsoft slashed 10,000 jobs this week, or about 5% of its workforce. When compared to Salesforce, a maker of business software, Amazon is shedding 18,000 jobs this month, but that represents a small portion of its 1.5 million-person workforce. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said in the fall that it will cut 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.
After buying the social media business last fall, Elon Musk reduced employment at Twitter.
Smaller players are also affected by those job losses. 450 individuals, or 10% of the workforce worldwide, were let go by the UK-based cybersecurity company Sophos. Coinbase, a platform for trading cryptocurrencies, reduced 20% of its workforce, or around 950 employees, in its second wave of layoffs in less than a year.
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According to the Wedbush analysts, “the stage is being set: tech names across the board are slashing expenses to preserve margins and becoming leaner” in the present economic context.
Despite indications of a slowing economy, the US employment market has remained resilient, as another 223,000 jobs were created in December. But due to rising demand brought on by employees starting to work remotely, the tech industry grew incredibly quickly over the last several years.
Even with the most recent wave of job cuts, the CEOs of a number of corporations have taken the heat for expanding too quickly, yet those same companies are still considerably bigger than they were before the economic boom brought on by the pandemic started.
Both Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized the need to capitalize on their advancements in artificial intelligence technology in their layoff announcements, reflecting a resurgence of competition between the industry’s titans of tech brought on by Microsoft’s expanding partnership with the San Francisco startup OpenAI.
