Google boss Sundar Pichai identified “durable cost savings” among the many tech giant’s key goals in 2024 – even after the corporate spooked some employees by teeing up renewed rounds of layoffs
This month, Google has already confirmed layoffs across multiple parts of its empire – including several hundred job cuts on its ad sales team and greater than 1,000 combined employees in other units, including its core engineering team and the hardware division chargeable for devices such as the Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.
The corporate further referenced its belt-tightening plans on a listing of “2024 company-wide OKRs,” or objective key results, that Google shared with its employees last Thursday.
“Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings,” said certainly one of the seven stated goals, in line with a replica obtained by The Verge.
The highest goal on Google’s list was to “deliver the world’s most advanced, protected, and responsible AI.” The memo also mentioned boosting innovation through Google Cloud services and constructing “essentially the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices.”
Pichai acknowledged that more layoffs were on the best way during a company-wide memo last Wednesday – stating that the corporate desired to remove “layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.”
“Lots of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will proceed to make specific resource allocation decisions all year long where needed, and a few roles could also be impacted,” Pichai said.
The Google boss noted that the layoffs wouldn’t be “at the size of last yr’s reductions,” when the corporate cut some 12,000 employees. Google had greater than 182,000 employees world wide as of last fall, in line with filings.
Still, the clear signs that more cost-cutting measures will happen has “lots of employees on edge,” in line with The Verge.
Google representatives didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
As The Post reported, some current and former Google employees blasted the corporate for its handling of the most recent wave of job cuts.
“Call me old style, but I feel that when you end up in a situation where you must let someone go, you owe it to them to fulfill them face-to-face, look them within the eyes, and acknowledge their humanity,” Kenneth Smith, a former Google engineering manager who was laid off, wrote on LinkedIn.
The cost-cutting moves got here as Google pours more resources into its heated competition with Microsoft-backed OpenAI to develop advanced AI systems. In December, Google released Gemini, its latest large-language AI model.
Pichai said he would take questions from employees in the course of the company’s planned all-hands meeting later this month.