Google’s Sundar Pichai calls for staff cuts to avoid ‘much worse’ issues

In an internal meeting, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc, said he had consulted with the company’s founders and board to decide on the 6% cut, according to comments reviewed by Bloomberg.

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“If you don’t act clearly and decisively and quickly, we could exacerbate the problem and make it worse,” Pichai said.

Google said on Friday it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, becoming the latest tech giant to carry out layoffs after years of abundant growth and hiring. Although speculation about the cuts had been rife for months, the layoffs were still a blow to the system for some employees. Some realized that they had lost their jobs when they could not access the corporate system. Yet Pichai insisted that the cuts were the product of careful consideration.

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“The process was far from random,” he said.

The size of Google’s workforce forced executives to keep the circle of decision makers relatively small, said Fiona Ciccioni, Google’s chief public officer, in a meeting with employees.

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“In a perfect world, we would have given managers the information in advance, but we have over 30,000 managers at Google,” Cicconi said. “We wanted to give certainty soon.”

Another executive said the severance package was designed to reward employees with long tenure at the company.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, stressed at the meeting that the cuts were intended to free up the company to continue investing in key priorities.

“Act early, and then you create the ability to invest for long-term growth,” Porat said.

The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification.