New year new rules! This statement has been taken very seriously by some of the tech giant companies across the world and one of them is Google.
Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. has joined several other companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Swiggy to downsize their company by reducing the headcounts with a mass layoff plan across the globe.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate. It is a holding company headquartered in California. It was born out of the reconstruction of Google in the year 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries.
The termination of the employees has already been done in the US where the employees were sent a staff memorandum followed by an automated account deactivation at 3am in the morning of 20th january. Soon it will be done in other parts of the world.
The memo had the difficult news written by the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai stating that in these difficult times they have decided to downsize the company and the affected employees will be given a severance package.
Let's look into what made companies like Google take such a drastic decision.
Google has seen that reducing the headcounts with a layoff plan of eliminating 12,000 of its employees which accounts for 6% reduction of the total staff is the best way to get going in these difficult times.
In a drastic cost-cutting exercise amid fears of a looming recession, downsizing is the only way out after a pandemic-led hiring spree left them droopy in this weak economy.
The economic recession is most likely to hit this year. The news is all over the world. The threat of recession will remain alive and cause severe downfall in the US economy. As per the research, estimation on the probability of a meaningful downturn in the American economy in the next 12 months will be at 65%.
It is Google's biggest-ever attempt of layoffs. This adds to another thousands of other job losses recently announced by the other tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Swiggy, and Meta.
The mass firing is on across the countries as companies are tightening their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. The total number of job cuts that the world is going to face this year is more than 48,000 world wide.
Coming back to the Google layoff, it is stated in the staff memo that, besides the economic recession, the technology sector reels from layoffs and companies stake their futures on artificial intelligence (AI). Shares of Alphabet Inc. were up nearly 4% in morning trade. The cuts came through at a delicate moment for the U.S. company, which has long been the leader in key areas of AI research.
Alphabet Inc. now faces a new challenge from Microsoft Corp. A bunch of tech that can create any content virtually that a user thinks of and types in a text box.
Researchers and observers say that the generative AI may test Google's dominance in internet search after OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed startup, has released a chatbot called ChatGPT that can answer queries with human-like responses.
Google had faced a different economic reality for the past two years when it speedily expanded its headcounts. With economic recession knocking at the door, Google geared up to downsize the company to increase voluntary turnover.
While we sympathise with all these people who have lost their jobs, it's also an opportunity for something new to happen.
An ending is a new beginning. The big tech companies did what they had to in order to save their company but this does not mean its the end of the world.