Another pink slip Friday in Silicon Valley; Google axes 12,000 jobs in latest wave of tech layoffs

SANTA CLARA --  Another pink slip Friday in Silicon Valley. Google has sent out emails to its US-based employees informing them that they are among the 12,000 workers being paid off.

CEO Sundar Pichai made the stunning revelation of the latest tech giant to make cuts on a company blog that greeted employees Friday morning.

"I have some difficult news to share," he wrote. "We've decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We've already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected."

"This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with," he continued. "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."

The layoffs amount to about 6% of Google's workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed.

The firings adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations.

The jobs being eliminated "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," Pichai said.

In a regulatory filing late last year, the company said that it employed nearly 187,000 people.

Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was "bound to go through difficult economic cycles."

"These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities," he wrote.

There will be job cuts in the U.S. and in other countries, according to Pchai's letter.

Hemant Rawat is an engineer working in the tech industry with a worker's visa. He understands the pressure workers like him face when they get laid off, forced to find work quickly before they must return home. 

"I just think about them when I hear this news," he told KPIX. "They are right now very stressed out and not in the mood to talk about it."

He has lived in the Bay Area for more than 10 years now and knows people who were recently laid off and had to go back home last year. For his family, there is a shared concern about having to go back to India and taking children away from the U.S. when that is the only country they have ever known. 

"They have developed so much relationship here, they have developed so much friendship here, they have left their homes back in their home country, and their kids are growing here," he said. "If I lose a job, and I have to go right away and pack everything and take her along with me."

Ellen Anderson is the principal recruiter at Santa Cruz Staffing who has experience in the tech industry and has been laid off before. She says following all of the announcements by tech companies to reduce their workforce demonstrates the need to stand out and be proactive even with low unemployment. 

"For me it hits even closer to home because I've personally experienced this."

In the current environment she says applicants need to have their resumes ready and be aware that there are a lot more people applying with degrees in computer science, especially out of college. Anderson says having any additional training to set yourself a part is crucial for recruiters. 

"I would say it's a tough job market, I really would," Anderson said. "I think there's a lot more competition than there was before."

But experts who have been following economic trends in the state for decades say this is a sector-specific issue that highlights the rapid growth in the tech industry during the pandemic. 

"The fundamentals are still strong, I mean I've been in the field now for forty plus years and during that time we've had four or five realignments and I would say this is one more realignment in tech," said Michael Bernick, an employment attorney with Duane Morris and the former director of the Employment Development Department. "I would say we are going to continue to see more layoffs, there is a lot of over hiring during the pandemic combined with the general economic slowdown."

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce. Amazon has said its cutting 18,000 jobs, although that's a fraction of its 1.5 million strong workforce. Facebook parent Meta is shedding 11,000 positions, or 13% of its workers, while business software maker Salesforce is laying off about 8,000 employees, or 10% of the total. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has slashed jobs at the company after he acquired it last fall.

Employment in the U.S. has been resilient despite signs of a slowing economy, and there were another 223,000 jobs added in December. Yet the tech sector grew exceptionally fast over the last several years due to increased demand as employees began to work remotely.

CEOs of a number of companies have taken blame for growing too fast, yet those same companies, even after the latest round of job cuts, remain much larger than they were before the economic boom from the pandemic began.