Sundar Pichai on laying off 12,000 Google employees: 'Not the right way'

Sundar Pichai further said that the layoffs at Google had a "clear big impact on morale" which reflected in the comments in "Googlegeist and the feedback."

The start of 2023 proved to be disastrous for the employees of Google's parent company Alphabet after the software giant decided to terminate 12,000 employees from its workforce due to fears of an oncoming recession, at the time.

As per a Business Insider report, CEO Sundar Pichai was asked about the decision to lay off so many employees at once in an all-hands meeting held on Tuesday.

"It has been almost 1 year since we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce. What impact did this decision have on our growth, P&L, and morale?" an employee is said to have asked Pichai.

In reply, the 51-year-old said that Google had not seen a moment like that in its history and admitted that the company could have taken a different route while handling the situation.

"This is difficult for any company to go through. At Google, we really haven't had a moment quite like that in 25 years. It became clear if we didn't act, it would have been a worse decision down the line. It would have been a major overhang on the company. I think it would have made it very difficult in a year like this with such a big shift in the world to create the capacity to invest in areas."

"Clearly it's not the right way to do it. I think it's something we could have done differently for sure," Pichai said.

Pichai further said that the terminations had a "clear big impact on morale" which reflected in the comments in "Googlegeist and the feedback."

The job cuts affected teams across the company including recruiting and some corporate functions, as well as some engineering and products teams.  The layoffs were global and impacted US staff, Google had said.

Also read: Sacked at 3 am, account deactivated, says Google employee of over 16 years