Here's what Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his employees on more layoffs

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company will need to be 'very, very disciplined' about hiring more employees throughout the year

Since the beginning of 2024, Google has laid off hundreds of employees. Unlike the mass layoff of 12,000 employees in 2023, this year's reductions have occurred gradually and in smaller batches. According to a report from CNBC, Google's chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai faced questioning from employees during an all-hands meeting.

During the meeting, Pichai was questioned about when employees could anticipate the "end to the uncertainty and disruption that layoffs create?".

To this, the Google CEO said that the majority of the layoffs would happen in the first six months of 2024. "Assuming current conditions, the second half of the year will be much smaller in scale," Pichai told the employees present in the meeting. He added that Google must be "very, very disciplined" about hiring more employees throughout the year.

 

Last year, Pichai issued a memo to the staff, expressing apologies for the layoffs. "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," he had said.

Google fires employees over protest against Project Nimbus

Recently, the company terminated 28 employees for participating in a sit-in protest against Google's collaboration with the Israeli government on "Project Nimbus", a $1.2 billion cloud computing initiative.

The police arrested nine protesters after they occupied Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office for over eight hours. The sit-ins in New York and California's Sunnyvale were led by "No Tech For Apartheid", which has been organising Google employees against Project Nimbus since 2021.

In a blog post on April 18, Alphabet CEO Pichai cautioned employees to not "use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics".

Pichai had said, "We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted."