Google India fires 453 employees across various departments

Tech giant Google has reportedly sacked 453 employees from various departments in India late at night on Thursday. 

As per a report by CNBC TV18, “The employees who were into dotted line reporting or did not have any direct managers have been laid off.” That said, many employees in Hyderabad and Bangalore working as level four software developers, backend developer, cloud engineers and digital marketers are the ones who have been laid off. 

In January this year, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced cutting 12.000 jobs or 6% of its total workforce, joining tech giants including Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Salesforce among others in scaling back operations amid a weakening global economy and rising inflation. Google alone (without its parent company Alphabet) however still employs over 170,000 around the world. 

The layoffs in India happened via mails just like how it happened in US. Many employees have put out on LinkedIn that they just woke up one morning to work as usual and found that their account has been deactivated, indicating that they have been laid off. 

One employee, Kamal Dave, account manager at Google's Gurugram, Haryana office posted on LinkedIn that he was “impacted by the layoff that happened yesterday as roles in the digital marketing Goals have been cut”. 

Another employee Saptak Mohanta, Program Manager at Google posted that "Absolutely gutted to lose a lot of my brilliant colleagues and friends as part of Google's layoffs in Singapore and India last night. It's going to take all of us some time to heal from this".

Further, Divyansh Verma, a Software Engineer at Google India office posted on LinkedIn that in the last 2-3 weeks there have been many speculations, assumptions, and fears in APAC regions regarding layoffs. “We don't know, how many more such layoff waves will come but I just wanted to say to be strong, focused, and with hard work, you will get to a better place,” was his message to his colleagues. 

Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of the company, had also mailed the employees stating that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

Pichai also announced that top executives will be subjected to pay cuts as part of the company's cost-cutting measures. “All roles above the senior vice president level will witness ‘very significant’ reduction in their annual bonus. For senior roles, the compensation is linked to company performance,” Pichai was quoted as saying by Business Insider in a report published on January 29. 

Meanwhile, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of the company’s streaming division YouTube and one of the first employees of the firm announced on Thursday that she will be stepping down from her role. She will be replaced by Indian-American Neal Mohan for the CEO role.  

Mohan will join a growing list of Indian-origin CEOs at the helm of US-based global giants, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.