Google and WeWork are the latest companies to announce layoffs in what has been a brutal few months for tech workers. On Friday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the search giant was cutting approximately 12,000 jobs. The cuts span the globe and myriad departments at Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Pichai’s reason for the cuts was much the same reasoning that Mark Zuckerberg gave when he announced layoffs at Facebook parent Meta in November: Google hired too aggressively over the past two years as the pandemic led to a boom time in the tech industry. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Pichai said.
The job cuts affect about 6% of Alphabet’s workforce and exceed the 10,000 employees that Microsoft laid off earlier this week. Also this week, WeWork eliminated 300 roles globally. With juggernauts like Google and Microsoft laying off tens of thousands, this week has been devastating to many working in the tech industry. It follows months of layoffs in the sector. In early January, Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts. That follows Meta’s 11,000 last November.
With the addition of Google this morning, here’s where the tech sector tally stands for layoffs announced by some of the industry’s biggest players since November 2022, according to data gathered from the layoff-tracking site Layoffs.fyi:
As for where Google goes from here, Pichai said affected employees in the United States have already been informed. Those employees will continue to receive pay during the notification period and also receive a minimum of 16 weeks of severance with two additional weeks paid for every year worked at Google.
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