Google’s parent company Alphabet to layoff 6 per cent or about 10,000 “low performing” employees

Google became the latest tech company to announce the truncation of its workforce. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, recently announced that they will be laying off about 10,000 or 6 per cent of its workforce, after identifying the “weak performers” across various teams and verticals.

A report by The Information has claimed that managers across various verticals in Google have been asked to analyse and rank the ‘poor performing’ employees on their teams. Google will use a ranking system to analyse their performance, and the lowest-ranked employees are expected to be fired from the company.

Google witnessed a major spike in hirings in the past quarter. Experts have been warning Google about its inflated workforce as well as salaries. Billionaire activist investor, Christopher Hohn, has claimed that Google employees are paid a lot more, in comparison to the rest of the industry. He claimed that the hiring has outpaced the actual need of the company.  

Google had earlier announced that it will be slowing down the hiring process in the fourth quarter of the year. However, the economy seems to have pushed the otherwise ’employee-friendly’ company to a wave of layoffs that is almost thrice the size of what is usually expected from Google.

Currently, Alphabet employs around 1,87,000 employees, making it one of the biggest employers in the tech industry. A US SEC filing revealed that the median annual salary of a Google employee is around $295,884 or roughly Rs 2.41 crore.   

Google has been witnessing a consistent drop in profits. The company reported a net profit of $13.9 billion in the last quarter which was 27 per cent lower compared to last year. This drop was despite an overall 6 per cent increase in revenue to $69.1 billion. 

Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and many prominent, US-based tech companies are on a mission to downsize. Most of the companies have registered their biggest layoffs ever in just the past month. Meta laid off over 11,000 employees, Twitter is left with less than a third of its entire workforce, and Amazon is also expected to continue layoffs well into 2023.