Google is about to slash 12,000 jobs.
It makes the company the latest in big tech to reduce its work force.
The cuts amount to about 6 percent of Google’s global work force.
Tech companies had massive hiring sprees during the Covid pandemic, when the demand for digital services boomed.
Overall broader concerns of economic slowdowns have also fed into tech job cuts.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, made the announcement on Friday. Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said the company expanded too rapidly during the pandemic, and now must refocus on projects and technology core to the company’s future.
This includes a focus on artificial intelligence.
Google joins a growing list of other technology companies that have laid off workers. Many Big Tech companies have concluded they overextended and over-hired under a belief that the booming demand for digital services and online tools during the pandemic represented a new normal.
Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Twitter are among others who have announced thousands of job cuts. More than 190,000 jobs have been cut by technology firms since the start of 2022.
These mark Google’s largest ever job cuts.
“We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Pichai said in a note to employees posted on the company’s website.
The list of tech layoffs marks the end of a period in which the technology industry experienced uninterrupted growth, expanded rapidly and battled for employees with lavish perks and high pay.
While the tech giants are trimming their work forces, they are still massively profitable. In 2021, Alphabet had profit of $76 billion and revenue of nearly $258 billion.
But even the tech industry is not immune from rising interest rates or a slumping global economy.
The advertising industry is struggling, therefore companies are purchasing fewer ads on Google or YouTube.
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