Google had to let go of a significant number of employees in 2023. The company fire more more than 12,000 people to be precise. However, laying off employees is not as simple as it sounds for a company. When a company lays off employees, they often provide compensation and other expenses to those employees as they leave. Google had to spend a total of $2.1 billion on these compensations and other related costs in 2023.
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Now, in the first month of 2024 alone, Google has already spent an additional $700 million on similar employee severance charges. This time, they are letting go of more than 1,000 additional roles (positions within the company). The parent company of Google, called Alphabet, shared this information when they released their financial results for the last quarter of the year.
Notably, Google laid off 1000 employees across departments in the first week of January. However, it looks like the company is not done firing people yet. CEO Sundar Pichai informed the employees to brace for more job cuts in the coming months.
In a memo to Google employees, which was accessed by The Verge, Sundar Pichai shared that the company has significant goals for the year, requiring substantial investments. However, to make room for these investments, tough decisions need to be made.
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These decisions include job cuts and restructuring in various Google teams, such as those working on hardware, advertising, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube.
“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”
Pichai acknowledged that these job cuts are not as extensive as the ones made the previous year, which affected 12,000 jobs. Despite the scale being smaller this time, he recognized the difficulty for employees witnessing colleagues and teams being impacted. The message emphasizes the necessity of these choices to create capacity for the company’s ambitious plans, underscoring the challenges that come with such decisions. “These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team,” he said.
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“Many of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted,” Pichai had said in the letter.
