Sundar Pichai defends Google layoffs, says need to act ‘decisive and early’

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the decision to lay off was taken after consultation with the founders and controlling shareholders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as the board of directors.

Pichai, who is facing criticism mass layoffs, Spoke to employees in an internal meeting on 23 January.

Pichai addressed the concerns after the recent layoffs that saw nearly 12,000 employees lose their jobs.

Google has announced that it will be almost 12,000 jobs To accommodate the slowing in company growth.

Pichai and other senior company executives said 750 senior leaders were involved in the process to determine who would be fired.

Defending the move, Pichai said that if decisive steps had not been taken, the problems would have worsened. “If you don’t act clearly and decisively and quickly, we could make the problem worse,” Pichai was quoted as saying. Bloomberg, “These are decisions that I needed to make,” he said.

Read also: Tech layoffs: From Google, Microsoft to Amazon, these giants announced massive job cuts

Pichai told employees that 2021 was one of the strongest years in Google’s history, with revenue growing by more than 40 percent. Believing that this trend would continue, the company expanded its workforce to keep pace with the growing business.

Pichai said, “You have to remember that if this trend continues and we don’t keep hiring to keep pace, we as a company will be left behind in many areas.” cnbc,

Job cuts at Google were being speculated for some time now, following massive layoffs at tech giants like Amazon and Meta. However, the news came as a big shock to the employees as some realized that they had lost their jobs only after failing to access their corporate systems.

Fiona Ciccioni, Google’s chief public officer, said that consulting with the company’s more than 30,000 managers was not possible, and that they needed a certainty soon.

Talking about the criteria for job cuts, he said that he chose areas where the work was important but the company had too many people as well as places where the work itself was not important.

Pichai also indicated that senior Google executives would take a substantial cut in their bonuses for the year.

Prior to the announcement of job cuts, Google had decided to pay 80% of bonuses in January, with the remainder expected in March or April.

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