Why would Google, despite making huge profits, lay off 6% of its workforce?
Google is the latest technology company to announce mass layoffs, sacking some 12,000 workers, more than 6% of its global workforce, the biggest in its history. The move, which affects employees in the United States, will be followed by layoffs in other countries, where the process will take longer due to labor laws.
So far, 18,000 jobs have been lost at Amazon (6% of the total), 12,000 at Google (6%), 11,000 at Meta (13%) and 10,000 at Microsoft (5%). The company missing from the top group, Apple, has not yet announced any cuts, largely because it had a more cautious hiring policy during the times of plenty, and also kept its operating expenses lower than its rivals. To those already mentioned, we should add 9,000 more departures at Salesforce, 4,100 at Cisco, 3,700 (for the moment) at Twitter, which has been left with 1,300 employees and only 550 engineers, 1,500 at Carvana, 1,250 at DoorDash, 1,000 at Stripe, and many others at a very long list of other companies. It’s a massacre.
Most of these companies are profitable, but which, as Sundar Pichai, hired “for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” For older, more experienced workers, nothing new, except for the magnitude: one more down cycle in the economy like others they have lived through. For younger people this is…
