You might have noticed that we have been posting a lot of news stories in January about small but still noticeable job cuts in many of Google's divisions. Well, it looks like we may be in for some more of those kinds of announcements, according to a new memo sent to company employees by its CEO Sundar Pichai.
The Verge reports that in the memo, Pichai stated that Google has "ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year." However, it looks like in order to achieve those goals, Pichai stated that the company will "have to make tough choices." Pichai wrote in the memo:
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.
In January of 2023, Pichai revealed that 12,000 Google employees, or about 6 percent of its total workforce at that time, would be laid off. In his new memo on Wednesday, Pichai wrote:
These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team . . . But I know it’s very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted.
So far, the company has cut over 1,000 members of its workforce in January 2024. It started with a few hundred cuts in its Devices and Services division. It was part of an overall reorganization of that group, with the Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest hardware teams now merging under one leader.
Google also confirmed cuts in its Assistant teams and its core engineering group, again with a few hundred workers affected in each division. Yet another few hundred employees were laid off earlier this week in its advertising sales division. On Wednesday, about 100 YouTube team members were laid off. Again, based on Pichai's memo, we can expect more of these smaller, but still painful, job cuts to be revealed in the future.
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