Google’s parent company has announced it will axe 12,000 staff, pushing total tech job losses above 200,000 since the start of last year, as industry bosses concede they overextended during the pandemic’s digital boom.
The latest cuts will affect around 6 per cent of the total workforce at Alphabet, which also owns autonomous car company Waymo, healthcare venture Verily and artificial intelligence researchers DeepMind.
“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,” Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a letter to employees on Friday. “I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”
Alphabet’s shares rose 3.4 per cent during pre-market trading on Friday, after the letter was published online.
Pichai’s is the latest admission by a Silicon Valley executive that in the wake of the pandemic tech companies erred by betting on continued stellar growth in sectors ranging from advertising to remote working.
The industry-wide cull has affected more than 50,000 people across just four Big Tech companies that also include Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Apple is now the largest tech company yet to announce any significant cuts.
Even before the Google announcement was made, more than 193,000 jobs had already gone at tech companies globally since the start of 2022, according to estimates from Layoffs.fyi, which aggregates reports of cuts.
Enterprise software giant Salesforce also recently announced it would cut 10 per cent of its staff, while Twitter cut half its workforce of 7,500 after it was acquired by Elon Musk.
Pichai said the roles being eliminated at his group would “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions”.
However, those cuts represent less than half of the 36,751 staff that Alphabet added in the year to September 2022, the most recent quarter for which figures are available. Alphabet’s total headcount had swelled by around 57 per cent since the beginning of 2020, to more than 185,000 in September.
Since the end of 2019, Amazon’s worker count has nearly doubled, while Microsoft grew its workforce in 2022 by more than double the previous year.
Silicon Valley giants continued their rapid hiring last year on the assumption the historic boom in digital demand would endure.
But tech companies now acknowledge they have also been affected by the pressures hitting other parts of the economy, due to straitened household budgets and corporate belt-tightening.
“As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimise their digital spend to do more with less,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in a memo to staff announcing lay-offs this week:
Pichai said the trimmed workforce at Alphabet would help sharpen the company’s focus particularly in areas like artificial intelligence, which he described as a “substantial opportunity”.
“Being constrained in some areas allows us to bet big on others. Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry,” he said.
The cuts come amid a severe slowdown in Google’s core search ad business in the third quarter of 2022, when Google Search revenue grew 4.2 per cent to $39.5bn, missing forecasts for 8 per cent growth.
Some analysts have questioned whether Big Tech is cutting fast or deep enough given the global economic slowdown. Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies said, “Most consider 5 per cent turning out the underperformers, which they should be doing every year anyway,” adding that others in the tech industry were cutting up to 10 per cent of their workforces.
Additional reporting by Fergus Ryan in London