As per reports, around 137 employees working for Waymo have been laid off. This is the second round of layoffs happening at Waymo this year, which brings the total cuts to 8 per cent of its workforce.
By Sneha Saha: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai fired 12000 employees earlier in January. Now, Google’s parent company has fired hundreds of more employees but this time from its self-driving technology unit, Waymo. In the second round of layoffs, Waymo has eliminated some engineering roles to “focus on commercial success”.
As per reports, around 137 employees working for Waymo have been laid off. This is the second round of layoffs happening at Waymo this year, which brings the total cuts to 8 per cent of its workforce. As for numbers, the company has, in total, cut a total of 209 jobs this year.
Pichai, in January 2023, announced to cut 12000 jobs across verticals globally, including India. The company started layoffs in India last month and reports suggest that the company sacked around 400 employees in the country. Many impacted Indian Google employees took to LinkedIn to post about job cuts and also said that they received layoff email without any prior warning.
Currently, there’s no clarity on the severance package that Google will offer to impacted Indian employees. In the US though, Google announced to pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days). The company also said that it will offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks’ salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting, pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time, and 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support. Though Google hasn’t revealed details about the severance package yet, it is believed to be similar to the US offerings. It basically also depends on the country’s rules and laws.
At the time of announcing layoffs in January, Pichai said that employees who scored lowest in the performance evaluation were impacted. However, employees including the ones from India believe that the layoffs were not on the basis of performance, instead it was random. The Google CEO during one of the townhalls clarified again that layoffs were not random.
Pichai took full responsibility for the layoffs and blamed the macroeconomic conditions for it. The Google CEO also said that the company overhired during the pandemic and that led to job cuts now. “Over the past two years, we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Pichai wrote in an email to employees in January.
Source: india today