The news of Google’s generous salary offer comes at a time when Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been vocal about the need for the company to make ‘tough choices’ to pave the way for future investments.
Google once offered an employee a 300% hike in salary. Can you imagine? In a recent discussion on the Big Technology Podcast, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, shed light on the extreme measures big tech companies like Google are willing to take to retain their employees. Srinivas recounted a specific instance where Google offered a staggering 4x (300% hike) salary hike to an employee contemplating a position at Perplexity AI. The employee, a member of Google’s ‘search team,’ was not even directly involved in the company’s AI division, IIT Madras Alumni said.
The news of Google’s generous salary offer comes at a time when Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been vocal about the need for the company to make ‘tough choices’ to pave the way for future investments. Pichai’s warning about potential job cuts has added to the uncertainty among Google employees, highlighting the competitive nature of the tech industry.
Additionally, Srinivas touched upon the issue of layoffs in the tech sector. He said there’s uncertainty about the criteria companies use to determine who is let go. He mentioned that, according to what he had heard, companies might target those with high salaries who do not proportionately contribute to productivity. He pointed out that at companies like Google, employees can take extensive vacations without affecting the company’s operations, though there seems to be a shift towards scrutinizing the output relative to compensation more closely.
Layoffs in 2024
Besides Google, many tech firms, present both globally and in the domestic sphere, have been announcing major layoffs since the inception of this year.
In the first few weeks of 2024, Layoffs.fyi, a tech layoffs tracker, reported layoff figures exceeding 34,000 employees.
In a recent interview with Morning Brew Daily’s podcast, Marc Zuckerberg highlighted that during the pandemic, e-commerce sales surged, leading to significant increases in online advertising revenue. However, as people resumed shopping in physical stores and the economy stabilized, sales growth slowed down, causing advertising rates to decrease.
He further said that many big tech firms (Meta included) realised the hard way that they had employed more staff than necessary and had to carry out significant layoffs.
Google has reportedly laid off over a thousand employees in various departments since January 10.
In 2023, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced plans to cut anywhere around 12,000 jobs, which accounted for around 6 per cent of its global workforce. “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 US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices,” Pichai said in an open letter.