Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai just laid off a bunch of employees at Google, with plans to lay off more–bringing the total to 12,000 roles. Pichai sent the following email to staff (emphasis added):
I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the U.S. who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.
Yes, U.S. Google employees got an email version of the traditional pink slip. This appears to be the popular way to lay people off. After all, there are no uncomfortable conversations, and you can tell thousands of people at once!
It’s also the wrong way to terminate employees. Your employees deserve better.
To keep reading, click here: Dear Sundar Pichai, Here Is How You Lay off Employees
Further, a strong reason that managers are paid more is that they have the responsibility to make the tough decisions about other people’s employment and carry out those actions. If you avoid the tough conversation, you don’t deserve the extra pay.
Besides having that eluded higher paycheck, doesn’t eliminate requiring a logistic setup for already decided layoff. The company was set up on conversations via emails which means that replies are expected. This move by Google to mass fire by email, just proves that the company is just like all other corporations and employees are merely numbers despite the illusion given of providing a caring environment. Especially given that they have a very intensive hiring process, someone must have realized that they were losing too much money in profit because of all the labor spent on employees and didn’t want to deal with spending money with a designated layoff group to process the layoff and created a program that did it in one fell swoop of hitting the enter button.
But the tech fields had already reached their plateau maximum and it was a matter of time when the all the companies would cut back on employees.