MOUNTAIN VIEW (California, US), Jan 21: The American multinational tech
giant, Google has sacked 12,000 employees, about 6% of its parent
company Alphabet's total 187,000-strong global workforce, while Microsoft has
laid off 10,000 staff.
Google (Alphabet Inc.) CEO Sundar Pichai has emailed the affected staff that their roles do not exist in the company any more. Assuming total responsibility for the brutal
action, Pichai indicated that the action is in line with the current economic
slump the US is facing.
Pichai said, “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.”
At the same time he also said in his email, “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,” he said.
However, he said, Alphabet had greatly expanded the workforce recently "for
a different economic reality than the one we face today".
In this context only he said, “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.”
Pichai said the employees in the US had already been notified about the cuts,
while in other countries it will take longer due to local labour laws.
He said the company will sharpen its focus on new priorities in the area of
artificial intelligence (AI). He sees the necessity of investing more in AI.
It looked like Google feels its search engine is being threatened by ChatGPT
(Generative Pre-trained Transformer). Microsoft could energise Bing with the
chatbot.
The severance package for the US employees include notification period payment
(minimum 60 days), at least 16 weeks of salaries, their 2022 bonus, paid vacations,
six months of health coverage and a payout for the number of years in service.
194,000 employees lost jobs in tech industry
It has been reported that about 194,000 employees have lost their jobs in the
tech industry in the US since the beginning of 2022, involving a thousand companies.
Microsoft will cut 10,000 jobs, it was announced a day ago. It had hired 40,000
during 2021-2022 to match the boom in business due to work, study and entertainment
at home during the pandemic, reaching a strength of 221,000 globally. Microsoft
chief executive Satya Nadella says that post-pandemic the customers are choosing
to "exercise caution". They argue the theory of "staff redundancies."
Amazon had terminated a massive 18,000 early this month (of 1,608,000 full-
time and part-time employees) and Meta (Facebook) had announced 11,000 job cuts on November 9, 13% of its workforce. Twitter and Salesforce are also cutting jobs to brace
for what they claim an economic slump.
The irony is that there is still demand for techies but in areas like AI and
analytics.
If recession is the reason, it has not affected jobs in other sectors in the
US as much.
Experts have no uniform conclusion about what is happening around! While some
say there was a "hypergrowth" while others say "overspending" and some others
as failure to see a looming slowdown.
