Full text: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo on hiring slowdown – Times of India

San Francisco: Alphabet Inc. Google In line with other tech giants, which have either made similar decisions or announced job cuts, hiring is planning for the rest of the year. Historically, Google has been relatively immune to the economic fallout of the technology sector, but in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News, the CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the uncertain global economic outlook as a major reason for the slowdown in hiring.
Here’s the memo, in full:
hi googlers,
It is hard to believe that we have already reached the first half of 2022. This is the perfect opportunity to thank everyone for the great work we’ve done so far this year and share how my chief and I are thinking about H2.
The uncertain global economic outlook has been top of mind. Like all companies, we are not immune from economic adversities. What I cherish about our culture is that we have never seen these kinds of challenges as obstacles. Instead, we see them as opportunities to shift our focus and invest for the long term.
In these moments, I turn to my mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It inspired me to join the company 18 years ago, and that’s what makes me so optimistic about the impact it will have on the world. With knowledge and computing, we advance our mission. That’s the lens we use to decide where to invest – whether it’s in areas like search, the cloud, YouTube, platforms and hardware, in their support teams, or in AI that leads to more useful products. and enables services.
We help people and society when we focus on what we do best, and do it really well. The investments we made in the first half of the year reflect this vision. In the second quarter alone, we added nearly 10,000 Googlers, and have a large number of commitments for Q3 start dates that reflect, in part, the seasonal college recruitment calendar. These are extraordinary numbers, and they reflect our enthusiasm about long-term opportunities, even in uncertain times.
Due to the recruitment progress we have made so far this year, we will slow down the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while supporting our most important opportunities. For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we will focus our recruitment on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and ensure the great talent we hire aligns with our long-term priorities.
Going forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with more urgency, sharper focus and greater appetite, as we have shown on sunny days. In some cases, this means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, it means halting development and redeploying resources to higher priority areas. It’s all up to us to make the company more efficient — we’ll be creating more ways for all of you to come and share ideas to help, so stay tuned.
Lack breeds clarity — it’s something we’ve been saying since the early days of Google. This is what drives the focus and creativity that ultimately leads to better products that help people all over the world. That’s the opportunity we have today, and I’m excited to rise again in this moment.