The Verge reported on Wednesday (Jan 17) that Google Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai urged employees to expect additional job layoffs this year. The report follows a recent round of layoffs that impacted 1,000 employees.
According to the article, Pichai issued a memo informing staff that “some roles may be impacted”. He also indicated that the company’s divisions were going through adjustments.
According to the memo, Pichai stated that the job cuts this year were aimed at reducing layers to simplify execution and increase pace in some areas.
The tech behemoth is still working to expand its artificial intelligence and automation capabilities in order to reduce workloads. These layoffs are strong signals that more jobs may be affected this year.
Pichai reminded all employees that “these role eliminations are not on the same scale as last year’s reductions and will not affect every team.”
“We have ambitious goals, and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai said in a statement.
A Google spokesman confirmed to Reuters that an email was distributed to all workers, but declined to comment on the memo’s contents.
Last week, Google said that it would let off a number of employees from its Voice Assistant groups, hardware teams responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit, advertising sales team, and augmented reality team.
“Throughout second-half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” the Google statement read.
“Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” it added.
In January 2023, Alphabet revealed plans to slash 12,000 workers or 6% of its global workforce. As of September 2023, the corporation had 182,381 employees worldwide.
People express fury
Since the news broke, Google employees have begun to respond on social media platforms. In one of the messages, an employee said, “Thank you, corporate overlords, for our new annual tradition.”
A post on X (formerly known as Twitter), mentioned, “As callous as Google’s and other big tech layoffs have been by sending you an email saying you’re unemployed, the viral Cloudflare layoff video is proof that it would be even worse optics for companies to do more. Best to realize we’re all just numbers on a spreadsheet to them.”