Tech giant Google will slow down on employment through 2023

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said in an email to employees that the company will cut down hiring and investment until 2023.

 “Like all companies, we’re not immune to economic headwinds,” Pichai wrote in the memo. “We need to be more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.”

As of its most recent quarterly report, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, employed close to 164,000 people.

The firm has already employed hundreds of people this year and will keep doing so, but Pichai stated in the message that it will start concentrating its employment on engineering and other "technical" positions.

“Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities,” he wrote. “For the balance of 2022 and 2023, the company will focus on hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles.”

In this time of economic uncertainty, Google, which has a history of making significant investments in R&D, will also be more selective about where money is being spent.

According to Pichai, in certain circumstances, this entails simplifying procedures and integrating investments in areas where they overlap. According to him, in some cases it will entail stopping development and redeploying resources to more important sectors.

Pichai stressed his excitement for the firm to once again rise to the occasion in his email to staff, saying that "scarcity breeds clarity."

As investors exit the equities that fueled the bull market of the previous ten years, Alphabet shares have fallen by 21% so far this year, plummeting with the rest of the tech sector. For the first quarter, the company fell short of analyst expectations, and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat issued a warning that maybe more challenging times lay ahead.

When the economy was recovering from the epidemic in the first quarter of 2021, growth was 34%. In the first quarter of 2022, growth dropped to 23% from the previous year. However, Pichai claimed in the letter that 10,000 new staff were employed by the business in the second quarter.

Since increasing interest rates have raised fears about a potential recession in the US and overseas, IT businesses have reduced investment and employment. In the past couple of months, a number of startups have announced job reductions, and venture capitalists have cautioned businesses to get ready for more challenging times ahead.

Tuesday saw a continuation of stock market declines as the euro dropped and nearly equaled the value of the US dollar. More than 192 points were lost by the Dow Jones industrial average.

The CEO encourages Google employees to be more ambitious, working with more urgency, clarity, and desire than they have on brighter days.

That may entail reducing procedures and combining investments where they overlap. In other situations, that entails stopping development and shifting resources to other important regions.