Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google has said that the bonus payouts of the company's top executives would be cut following the largest round of layoffs in the history of the company, the media has reported. This comes within a week of Google parent Alphabet announcing its plans to cut roughly 12,000 jobs, which means a reduction in its employees by 6 per cent.
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Speaking at a companywide meeting Pichai said employees at the senior-vice president level and above would get lower bonuses as part of cost-cutting measures, according to people who heard the remarks, says a report by The Wall Street Journal.
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This will be the tech behemoth's biggest-ever round of layoffs amid an economic slowdown. The company will provide severance packages that include vacation, bonus pay and healthcare, says a previous report by news agency Bloomberg.
The job cuts across Alphabet will impact employees globally and across the entire company, company CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an email on Friday. Pichai reportedly added that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here."
The reductions will cut across Alphabet units and geographies, the company said, though some areas, including recruiting and projects outside of the company’s core businesses, would be more heavily affected, says a previous report by The Wall Street Journal.
"Googlers, I have some difficult news to share. 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. I’m deeply sorry for that. I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here. Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today," said Pichai in his letter to his employees.
With the layoffs, Google parent now joins the likes of tech giants such as Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter and even Spotify that have drastically scaled back operations. However, courtesy of resilient search business, Google was one of the longest tech holdouts.