Google is now doing like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon and is kicking off a massive round of layoffs – 12,000 employees are about to find another job.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has announced that it is cutting around 12,000 positions. This corresponds to about six percent of employees globally.

The company will thus be the next in line of large tech companies that are cutting back on the number of employees.

Hired people for a different economic reality

CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, gave more details about the cuts in a blog post the other day: “It means we have to say goodbye to some incredibly talented people that we’ve worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I am deeply sorry about that. The fact that these changes will impact Googler’s lives weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that have led us here.”

He mentioned that the company has experienced periods of rapid growth over the past two years, but that they were hiring people for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

How Google will help the fired employees move forward

The affected U.S. employees will be paid for at least 60 days, as well as his 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation days.

In addition, the company has run a severance package in position equivalent to 16 weeks’ salary plus an additional two weeks per year the person has been employed, six months of health insurance, immigration support and job placement benefits.

In documents from September 2022, Alphabet revealed that it had 186,779 employees at the time, compared to the 156,500 employees it had at the end of 2021.

During the Q3 2022 earnings call, the company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, revealed that Alphabet had hired more than 12,000 people during that period.

Big layoffs at Big Tech

Companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon have also just been through large rounds of layoffs with 11,000, 10,000 and 18,000 layoffs respectively in recent times.

Close to 60,000 employees were laid off in the US tech industry in 2022, something analysts have dubbed the “Carnage of Silicon Valley”.