Following similar staff cuts at Amazon and Microsoft, Google CEO Pichai’s memo states that an email was sent to all employees made redundant, with layoffs in other countries set to follow over a longer period of time “due to local laws and practices”, reported CNBC.
The move to make staff redundant comes following plans made to defer portions of end-of-year staff bonus checks to March or April, as opposed to these being fully paid in January.
According to the memo, Google will offer all US-based employees laid off 16 weeks’ severance pay plus two weeks for each additional year they’ve worked at the corporation.
Pichai told employees that “we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today” over the past two years, which have proved prosperous.
Having apologised for the layoffs, claiming to take “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here”, he expressed confidence in product and service value going forward, as well as that of investments in AI.
“We’ll need to make tough choices,” he continued. “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.
“To the Googlers who are leaving us: Thank you for working so hard to help people and businesses everywhere. Your contributions have been invaluable and we are grateful for them.”
Following the announcement, shares in Google increased by five per cent in early trading.
Tech companies in Silicon Valley and beyond are taking measures to preserve budgets amidst economic uncertainty, including slowing down hiring or laying off employees.
Firms have been struggling with rising interest rates and inflation over the past year, leading to drops in shares and spending on advertising.
Talent availability
On the flip-side, the layoffs announced by Google and other big tech companies in recent times is set to make more tech talent available to startups looking to boost operations.
Along with redundancies, talent has been voluntarily resigning en masse due to a lack of career progression — a trend that has been referred to as part of The Great Resignation.
Speaking about this week’s worldwide IT spending forecast from Gartner, the research vice-president analyst John-David Lovelock told Information Age: “It’s been a long time since an enterprise was a cool place to work, and since an enterprise had an organisational size that would allow for progress through a career a that organisation.
“This isn’t true for tech service providers. They’re much more flexible with starting salaries and salary bands, because it is their business.
“So people moving from enterprises to TSPs. This is a foundational thing, and there’s very little that enterprises can do about it.”
Related:
Over 150,000 employees laid off by tech companies in 2022 – Analysis from Layoffs.fyi has found that 153,160 members of staff at tech companies were laid off across 2022, the highest amount since the dotcom bubble burst
The highest average tech job salaries in the UK revealed – IT industry researchers TechShielder has revealed the highest average tech job salaries currently offered across the UK, using Indeed’s Salary Guide tool
