Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, made a hint about additional job cuts in the upcoming year on Wednesday, The Verge reported. This was one day after the company laid off about 1,000 employees.
In an internal memo to Google staff, Pichai described it as a component of a broader restructuring plan and stated, “We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year.The truth is that we must make difficult decisions in order to make room for this investment.”
Further in the memo, Pichai mentioned the “tough decisions” and added, “These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions and will not touch every team.” His statement alluded to Google’s 2023 layoffs, which saw the tech giant let go of roughly 12,000 workers—the largest number of employees to be let go in a single year in the company’s history.
The report quotes Pichai as saying that this year’s layoffs were about “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.”
1,000 workers in Google’s advertising sales team are let go.
Pichai’s statement came the day after Google sent out pink slips to about a thousand members of the advertising sales team as part of the company’s first round of layoffs for 2024.
Severance pay would be given to eligible employees, according to the company. Additionally, it said that affected staff members could reapply for positions that were open in different departments. It did, however, make clear that individuals who were unable to obtain employment with the company would have to leave by April.
The changes transpired approximately a week after Google declared that hundreds of employees from the company’s Devices and Services division and voice-activated Google Assistant software would be let go.
In addition to Google, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon also declared last week that it would lay off several hundred workers from its studio and streaming divisions.
The precise number of job role cuts that either company plans to implement in 2024 has not been disclosed.
