The tech world is facing yet more bad news after Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced 12,000 employees are to lose their jobs. This amounts to around six percent of the company’s workforce and includes recruiters, corporate staff and people working on engineering and product teams.
CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to staff: “This [decision] will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.” He continued: “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
The announcement comes after a spate of job losses from the tech giants including Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta.
Stockholm-headquartered music streaming service Spotify announced on 23rd January that it is going to slash its workforce too. CEO Daniel Ek said in a letter: “As you are well aware, over the last few months we’ve made a considerable effort to rein-in costs, but it simply hasn’t been enough…
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.”
