• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 20, 2023

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, will lay off about 12,000 of its employees worldwide, starting with the United States, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Friday.

Employees will remain on the company’s payroll for 60 days and receive at least 16-weeks of salary in severance, along with other benefits.

Published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the open letter describes a faulting economy and a company trying to support too many employees that were “hired for a different economic reality” than today.

I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI,” Pichai wrote. “To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company.”

The roles being eliminated reflect the outcome of that review, cuts across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.

Verily, another Alphabet company, announced in an email to employees, and then posted it online, earlier this month it would lay off about 15% of staff “due to discontinued programs, full control of Granular and Onduo, and redundancy in the new, centralized organization.”

Alphabet is not the only tech company to experience these layoffs. The count stands at about 60,000 employees across the technology industry, according to some estimates.

Alphabet is not the only tech company to experience these layoffs. The count stands at about 60,000 employees across the technology industry, according to some estimates.

Microsoft earlier this week announced 10,000 job cuts, affecting about 5% of its workforce. Amazon will cut about 18,000 jobs or 1.2% of its global workforce. Meta’s Facebook late last year said it would lay off about 11,000

Trip Chowdhry, Global Equities Research general manager, in September 2022 estimated Amazon would lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. In a research note, he pointed to that the Amazon CEO sold stock.

Many analysts believe when employees of a company start selling stock it’s a tip of financial turmoil ahead.

Crypto cut 500 jobs; Coinbase cut 2,000 jobs; Salesforce cut 7,000 jobs; Tesla cut 6,000 jobs; Twitter cut 3,700 jobs; Lyft cut 700 jobs; Strip cut 1,100 jobs; Robinhood cut 1,100 jobs; Snap cut 1,000 jobs; Shopify cut 1,000 jobs; Netflix cut 450 jobs; according to one report.