It is the company's biggest-ever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft,
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
He said the layoffs reflect a “rigorous review" carried out by
The jobs being eliminated “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” Pichai said. He said he was “deeply sorry” for the layoffs.
Regulatory filings illustrate how Google’s workforce swelled during the pandemic, ballooning to nearly 187,000 people by late last year from 119,000 at the end of 2019.
Pichai said that
“These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” he wrote. He called out the company's investments in artificial intelligence as an area of opportunity.
There will be job cuts in the
Tech companies that “not long ago were the darlings of the stock market” have been forced to freeze hiring and cut jobs in preparation for an economic downturn, said a note from
“Digital spending is suffering, and ad revenues are falling with it,” she wrote.
Just this week, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce.
Those job cuts are hitting smaller players as well.
Employment in the
CEOs of a number of companies have taken blame for growing too fast, yet those same companies, even after the latest round of job cuts, remain much larger than they were before the economic boom from the pandemic began.
“I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” Pichai wrote.
While the tech layoffs are “shocking numbers,” their effect on tech industry employment is “nowhere near as bad as what it seems,” said
“These workers who were laid off will readily get new jobs,” most likely at smaller tech companies, Blevins said. “They’re coming with high credentials from these big firms. That knowledge will be transferred and will actually work to everyone’s benefit.”
In their layoff announcements, both Pichai and Microsoft CEO
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AP Technology Writers
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