Google is going to cut 12,000 jobs, or layoffs around 6% of its employees, making it the latest tech company in the series to do so due to the COVID-19 pandemic effects.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the parent company of Google, informed to staff on Friday at the Silicon Valley about the jobs cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog post.
It is one of the largest rounds of layoffs the company has ever witnessed, and it add in the series of the tens of thousands of other job losses in Tech industries recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent company Meta, and other tech companies as they tighten their belts in the face of a gloomier outlook for the sector. At least 48,000 job losses have been announced by significant corporations in the industry only this month.
Sundar Pichai wrote in his email:
“This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”
He continue-
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.
I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”
Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was “bound to go through difficult economic cycles.”
“These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” he added.
”There will be job cuts in the U.S. and in other unspecified countries”, according to Pichai’s email
Visit the link for Pichai’s full email or letter – https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/
According to Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives, Taz Koujalgi, and John Katsingris,
The tech industry has been forced to freeze hiring and cut jobs “as the clock has struck midnight on hyper growth and digital advertising headwinds are on the horizon,”
Microsoft has announced the elimination of 10,000 jobs, or approximately 5% of its workforce. Amazon announced this month that it would be eliminating 18,000 jobs, a small portion of its 1.5 million-person workforce, while commercial software provider Salesforce will be eliminating 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its staff. Facebook parent Meta stated last October that it would cut 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.
following this trend, Elon Musk slashed jobs at Twitter after after he acquired Twitter.
These job cuts are hitting smaller Tech companies also. Sophos, a cybersecurity company based in the UK, let go of 450 workers, or 10% of its whole workforce. In its second round of layoffs in less than a year, cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase reduced 20% of its workforce, or around 950 employees, from the total.
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