Bad times for 12,000 Googlers who will become “xooglers” (former Google employees) in a few days. In fact, like Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter or Meta, Google has decided to fire many people around the world…
Thousands of Googlers around the world recently received an unfriendly email from their CEO, Sundar Pichai. Here is a summary of what he said: I have some difficult news to share. We have decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 positions. We have already sent a separate email to affected US employees. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices. (…) During the last two years, we have experienced periods of spectacular growth. To match and fuel this growth, we employed a different economic reality than we know today. (…) As a company for nearly 25 years, we are doomed to go through difficult economic cycles. These are important times to refocus, reorganize our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities. (…) Thanks to early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. And we are about to share completely new experiences for users, developers and companies. AI in our products presents us with a huge opportunity, and we are ready to approach it boldly and responsibly. (…) All this work is a continuation of the “healthy disregard for the impossible” that has been at the core of our culture from the beginning. »
As of September 2022, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had 187,000 employees. Therefore, 6% of its workforce is being made redundant, which is far from insignificant. In this, it joins most of the other major Internet companies that have all cut their workforce recently: Meta/Facebook (11,000 postings), Amazon (18,000), Twitter (3,700), Microsoft (10,000), Spotify (600 ) etc. According to the Layoffs.fyi site, almost 160,000 workers in the sector lost their jobs in the US in 2022 and already 57,600 in 2023!
These measures therefore reflect an economic downturn in the sector and particularly in online advertising. Let’s also hope that the ChatGPT and AI buzz, seen as an opportunity by Sundar Pichai, will not create a new bubble that will burst soon, making the situation even more alarming!
Like what, we thought it was impossible for Google, a very wealthy company par excellence, to lay off en masse like that one day… And yet it happens. Shareholders will surely be fully satisfied… Following this announcement, Alphabet’s share price rose 3.5% in electronic trading ahead of the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. Everything is therefore perfectly fine in the best of all possible worlds… 🙁
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Source: Wikipedia