Google’s parent company Alphabet is the next major tech company to undergo massive layoffs.
The search giant says it plans to eliminate roughly 12,000 jobs and reduce its staff by 6%, its largest round of layoffs in company history, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company said that the job cuts would span the entire company, but some segments, like recruiting and projects outside the company’s core businesses, will see greater layoffs.
In an email to employees, the CEO of Alphabet (and Google) said that to capitalize on the company’s early investments in artificial intelligence, the company must make tough choices. By eliminating these jobs, the company will realign its focus to better capture AI’s momentum.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Google’s workforce ballooned to 187,000 through the pandemic, up from 119,000 employees in 2019.
“It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead. There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have,” said Sundar Pichai.
The announcement is the latest round of significant layoffs in the tech sector. Microsoft recently announced it was laying off as many as 11,000 employees. Amazon is expected to cut over 18,000 employees, also the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history, according to CNBC.
Facebook’s parent company Meta announced it is cutting 10,000 employees. In case you had forgotten, since Elon Musk took over Twitter, his layoffs have generated significant headlines. Musk has reduced Twitter’s workforce by 50%, and the company expects more layoffs.
“The stage is being set: tech names across the board are cutting costs to preserve margins and get leaner,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said.
The left was in an uproar when musk fired some 10000 employees. Now with these left leaning companies like google and Facebook doing the same, little is said about the employees that are losing their incomes. The two year shutdown to ease the curve, the ridiculous spending by this administration along now with unemployment rates increasing are leading the American people to a recession equal to the carter administration and potentially equal to the Great Recession. The government is the reason for this time in history and the people who voted for democrat are asking the same to fix it. Wake up. Biden recently said that the economy is doing well, just look at the employment rate. Actually employment always is the last to go when entering a recession. That’s just common sense. Democrats are destroying this country in every way. Economy, morals, the border in all ways.