Fears of mass sackings at Google Australia after the tech giant cut 12,000 people from its US team – leaving axed workers in tears
- 12,000 Google staff to lose their jobs in the United States
- Speculation 120 Google staffers could lose jobs here
- Meta and Amazon sacked 31,000 workers between them
Australian Google employees may soon be posting their own tearful sacking videos after the tech giant admitted no country was immune to its mass sacking campaign after it fired 12,000 Americans.
The tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, shocked loyal US employees with an email announcing 12,000 people were being laid off last Friday.
That equates to around six per cent of the company’s US workforce losing their jobs.
Google is the latest IT company to deliver a bitter pill to thousands of employees.
Meta (Facebook) let go of 13,000 employees in November, while Amazon sacked 18,000 two weeks ago.
America’s Google employees received the brutal email announcement that 12,000 people would lose their jobs. Among them was vlogger Nicole Tsai who regularly posted TikTok videos showing the perks and luxuries available to staff
Google has begun mass sackings in the United States and it is expected Australian employees will be joining their American colleagues in the unemployment queue in coming weeks
Now Google has followed suit and is not expected to stop with job cuts in the US.
It is expected to continue delivering bad news, with country-by-country statements detailing staff cuts.
If the company were to cut the same proportion of Australia’s 2,000 Google staff, 120 people would be fired.
The tech giants said they had made the cuts partly due to fears a recession will strike the US and Europe this year.
Amazon blamed ‘uncertainty’ in the economy.
Google’s method of communicating the sackings – by email – and also the lack of support has attracted criticism for being ‘impersonal’ and ‘lacking humanity’.
Google has long had a reputation for providing an enjoyable ‘campus’ style office environment
Things such as pinball and games were provided for Google staff to get immediate downtime in between work assignments. But there were no group hugs from management for the 12,000 people sacked in the US
The cold delivery of job loss announcement stands at odds with the apparently people-friendly workplaces – known as ‘campuses’ – that Google has provided to its employees or years.
Nowhere was this more apparent than with a young Los Angeles vlogger, Nicole Tsai, who had been uploading regular clips describing ‘a day in the life’ of a Google employee since December.
In the clips, she showed off the many unusually fun aspects of the google ‘campuses’, including everything from a giant indoor slide for staff to a DJ’s turntable embedded in a kitchen bench, through to the food available to google staff.
One follower on TikTok asked if Ms Tsai’s clips showed ‘daycare for adults’.
Her latest ‘a day in the life of’ TikTok covered her own sacking.
‘I woke up to the really ominous text from my boss,’ she said.
She was directed by her boss to ‘watch the news’ then found herself locked out of all computer systems without warning.
There will be 12,000 fewer ‘Googlers’ using the tech giant’s campus-style workplaces after mass redunancies began
Google is the latest IT company to deliver a bill pill to thousands of employees
‘I called my boss back and we just sobbed over the phone. She was also finding out about my lay-off for the first time.’
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet said the layoffs ‘weigh heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.’
He also attributed some of the losses to the development of AI technologies.
He said to ‘fully capture’ Google’s ‘early investments in AI’ that ‘tough choices’ needed to be made.
‘This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that.’
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