Brace for more job cuts in 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells employees

Tough choices have to be made to create capacity for big priorities and investments, said Pichai, in an internal memo to employees, said a report in The Verge.

Thursday January 18, 2024 , 2 min Read

Tech giant Google plans to let go of more employees, according to a report in The Verge.

The report said Google CEO Sundar Pichai has sent a message to employees to brace for more cuts. This comes after the company's recent reduction in workforce across various departments earlier this month.

“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year. The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices,” Pichai said in an internal memo to its employees, adding that more “role eliminations” are to come.

YourStory could not verify the memo. Queries sent to Google remained unanswered at the time of publishing this copy.

Until now, the "tough choices" have involved layoffs and reorganisations across Google's hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.

However, referring to the 12,000 jobs that the tech giant cut this time last year—around 6% of its global workforce—Pichai said, in the memo, that the current “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,” he said, adding that the layoffs this year were about “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.”

As of September 30, 2023, the employee count at Alphabet, Google's parent company, was 1,82,381—down from 1,86,779 in 2022—which was reported during the third-quarter earnings call.