Google Parent Alphabet Layoffs Hit Cloud, Partnerships, UX, Engineers, Recruiters

Recruiters, software engineers, user experience (UX) professionals and workers in Google Cloud are among the 12,000 employees being laid off by Alphabet.

The earliest round of Google parent Alphabet’s 12,000 employees to be laid off includes recruiters, software engineers, user experience (UX) professionals and workers in the fast-growing Google Cloud, widely regarded as the No. 3 cloud offering after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The 12,000 employees represent about 6 percent of the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant’s workforce, surpassing the 10,000 employees Microsoft said it would cut, which accounts for 5 percent of its workforce.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he remains confident about “future growth” given the opportunities ahead and the company’s “early investments” in artificial intelligence.

[RELATED: Google Cloud Parent Alphabet Laying Off 12,000 As Sundar Pichai Takes ‘Full Responsibility’]

Who Was Laid Off From Google?

“I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI,” Pichai said. “To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”

CRN has reached out to Alphabet for comment.

The company still lists almost 1,000 job openings on its website despite the layoffs. Recently posted roles include a senior software engineer for Google Cloud networking, a fleet transition program manager for the global infrastructure group and a level three software engineer for infrastructure in Google Cloud security and privacy.

Former employees took to LinkedIn to post about learning oftheir layoffs through email and to express sadness at the news and gratitude for their time with Google.

“So after over 16.5 years at Google, I appear to have been let go via an automated account deactivation at 3am this morning as one of the lucky 12,000,” wrote a software engineering manager working on global civics data ecosystems with Search.

“It was a (largely) wonderful 16 years, and I’m really proud of the work that I and my teams did over the years,” the software engineering manager continued.

A product manager who said she is one of the 12,000 laid-off employees wrote that she “didn‘t expect my journey at Google is going to end so soon.”

“It still felt like yesterday when the Google recruiter informed me that I made it last summer, and it felt like a dream when I received an email this morning notifying me that Google layoffs impacted my role,” she said.

Former Google Cloud, sales and partnership employees who posted on LinkedIn about getting laid off include:

*The head of strategic product partnerships for Search, who’d worked at Google for more than 12 years

*A global seller enablement employee for Google Cloud customer experience who worked at the company for about nine years

*A Google Cloud enterprise field sales employee who worked with the company for almost three years

*The head of product partnerships for Cloud AI, who worked at Google for more than 16 years

*An executive business partner and administrative business partner program manager who worked at Google for more than 11 years

*A UX solution engineer for cloud solutions studio who worked at the company for more than four years

*A technical program manager for Google Cloud’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU) system software used for ML workloads

*A strategic account executive for Google Cloud customers using GKE, Anthos, ML, AI and other Google products, who clocked in more than five years with the company

*A technical program manager who worked on new Google Cloud Platform region creation

*A eight-plus-year software engineer at Google who worked on cross-platform systems in the Google Workspace organization

*A four-plus-year Google employee who most recently worked as a cloud value adviser to large enterprise customers considering a switch to Google Workspace, AppSheet and Chrome

Other former Google engineering employees who were cut include:

*A level six staff software engineer who worked at Google for almost 20 years and was an early member of Project Fi

*A software engineer specializing in computer graphics and back end with extensive experience in C/C++, Python and Java

*A staff software engineer who worked at Google for about two years

*A developer relations engineer at Google for more than a year

*A site reliability engineer who worked at Google for more than 17 years

*A software engineer who worked at Google for more than eight years

Employees involved in UX without the “engineer” title who were let go include:

*A senior staff UX designer who worked at Google for more than a year

*The vice president of UX for the Google knowledge and information suite of products, which includes Search and Assistant, who worked at the company for more than 11 years

*The lead for Google Assistant’s UX program and operations team who worked at the company for more than 11 years

*A visual branding language lead for the Google Assistant UX team

Google managers who were let go Friday include:

*A technical program manager with experience in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), AI and machine learning (ML)

*A senior manager in the data analytics space who defined the go-to-market strategy for Google applications security and compliance solutions and worked at the company for more than 15 years

*A group product manager for YouTube Ads who worked at Google for about seven years

*A software engineering manager on Google’s Chromium web browser who was working on a Chrome Data project

*A Google Photos business development manager for strategy and partnerships who worked at the company for more than seven years

*A program manager for Google’s Wing drone delivery company who worked for Google for more than seven years

Other roles Google cut include:

*A brand team video editor

*A multimedia communications producer who worked with Google for more than four years

*The chief of staff for Google’s Area 120, who worked at Google for about 12 years

*A project executive for Google’s real estate and workplace services division who worked at the company for more than eight years

And multiple employees involved in recruitment were cut from the company. One sourcer for supply chain technical and nontechnical program managers had worked at Google for more than five years. A sourcer for technical program managers within Google consumer products had worked at the company for almost four years.

Google is among a wave of technology vendors shedding workers as the U.S. potentially is headed for a recession, with inflation and interest rates continuing to grow.

Microsoft, 8x8, JumpCloud and Sophos are among the vendors to announce layoffs due to the economic downturn.