Google has laid off more than 1,000 employees across various departments since January 10. The announcement came in the form of an internal memo from CEO Sundar Pichai, who warned employees to brace themselves for additional cuts in the future, as reported by The Verge.
Pichai addressed the entire Google workforce on Wednesday, revealing, “We have ambitious goals and will invest in our big priorities this year.” The CEO acknowledged the challenges ahead, saying, “The reality is that to build this investment capacity, we have to make difficult choices.”
The impact of these “tough choices” has already been felt across multiple departments, including hardware, ad sales, trust and security, shopping, maps, policy core engineering, and the YouTube team. Pichai emphasized that these layoffs and restructurings, while significant, do not reflect the scale of the 12,000 job cuts carried out by Google during the same period last year.
“This role elimination is not on the scale of last year’s reductions and will not affect every team,” Pichai wrote in the memo. He acknowledges the emotional toll on staff, saying, “but I know it’s very hard to see colleagues and teams affected.”
Providing insight into the company’s rationale, Pichai explained that the layoffs this year are aimed at “removing layers to ease the pace of execution and operations in some areas.” However, he didn’t shy away from confirming the fears of many within Google, noting that more “role elimination” is on the horizon.
“Many of these changes have already been announced, although to anticipate, some teams will continue to make decisions to allocate specific resources throughout the year where needed and some roles may be affected,” Pichai warned.
Google found itself in a trend shared by several tech companies by resorting to layoffs this month.