Since January 10, Google has laid off more than 1,000 employees across various departments. CEO Sundar Pichai's message is to prepare for more layoffs. "We have ambitious goals and will invest in our big priorities this year," Pichai told all Google employees in an internal memo on Wednesday. "The reality is that in order to create the capacity for that investment, we have to make hard choices."
So far, those "hard choices" include layoffs and reorganizations across Google's hardware, ad sales, trust and safety, shopping, maps, policy core engineering and YouTube teams.
"These job cuts are not on the scale of last year's layoffs and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote in the memo, referring to the 12,000 Google layoffs this time last year. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams affected."
Pichai said this year's layoffs are about "removing layers, simplifying execution and increasing speed in some areas." He confirmed what many within Google feared: more "role eliminations" are coming. "Many of these changes have already been announced, but to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions as needed throughout the year and some roles may be impacted."