Google is latest tech firm to put a 'go slow' on new hires

Alphabet Inc’s said on Wednesday it would slow the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, the latest company to make such a move as decades-high and the fallout from the Ukraine crisis pressure businesses.

The announcement aligns Google with other major tech companies including Technologies Inc and Inc and comes a day after Microsoft Corp said it would eliminate some positions.

‚Like all companies, stonededge we’re not immune to economic headwinds,‘ Alphabet said in a regulatory filing.

Hiring efforts will be focused towards engineering and technical roles, it said.

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the company will have to ‚be more entrepreneurial‘ and work with ‚greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days‘, according to an internal memo seen by .

Pichai said that the move will mean ‚pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas‘.

A number of companies, including Uber and Meta, have scaled back their hiring whilst others – like Netflix – have laid off staff.

Mark Zuckerburg has decided to gettough on staff as managers have been ordered to oust ‚coasting‘ employees amidst a devastating downturn in value.

An internal memo sent on Friday by Facebook’s head of engineering, Maher Saba.‘

The move is a dramatic change of tone for the social media giant – recently rebranded as Meta – which was well known in its early days for setting the tone for the relaxed and laid-back corporate attitude that came to characterize Silicon Valley.

The news comes as Facebook’s value has plummeted in the past months – declining nearly 52 per cent since the start of 2022 – amidst an ongoing reckoning of the company’s privacy policies that has gutted its longtime method of making money by selling user data.

‚If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,‘ Mark Zuckerberg told employees during a companywide call in late June.

The 38-year-old Facebook founder said during the call that he expected to reduce engineer hiring plans by at least 30 per cent as the company looks for ways to cut costs, according to Reuters.

On the call, Zuckerberg indicated that one of those cost cutting methods would be rooting out dead weight. 

‚Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,‘ he said.

It was not immediately clear what led Zuckerberg to believe there was dead-weight in the company’s staff. 

The memo from Saba appeared to be one of the first steps in that process, with many employees expressing fear that their jobs may be on the line in the face of layoffs. 

‚The reaction from folks that have seen this is that this will be used to create a bunch [of] ‚performance improvement plans‘ that will result in mass layoffs,‘ an anonymous individual close to the matter told .

Employees are also worried about a reduction in promotions and shrunken bonuses, according to the Post.

‚I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,‘ Zuckerberg told employees on the June call.

At the end of 2021, Facebook reported that it had lost daily users for the first time since it was started 18 years ago.

The downturn comes after Apple introduced privacy policies on its devices intended to curb outside parties‘ ability to gather and sell user’s data. Apps – including Facebook – were forced to ask people whether they wanted their activity tracked so they could receive targeted ads. Many declined, and gutted Facebook of that cornerstone source of income.

The company has also faced growing competition from other social media apps like TikTok, despite leaning heavily into its own short form video platform, Reels.

Profits at Facebook have also declined since it was rebranded Meta, following Zuckerberg’s bet that the next era of the internet will be a virtual-reality based immersive experience known as the metaverse.

Meanwhile, in May, Uber said it will scale back hiring and reduce expenditure on its marketing and incentive activities after the company posted a $5.9 billion loss for the first quarter of 2022, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an email to staff.

Khosrowshahi scutting about 150 jobs after losing 200,000 subscribers since the end of last year.

Most of the employees being laid off are based in the US and work in creative positions across film and TV.

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