If the company is not 20% more efficient, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has made further job cuts seem likely. This comes just a few weeks after Google officials allegedly threatened to fire staff members if the company’s next quarterly earnings did not meet expectations, saying “there will be blood on the streets” in that case.
Sundar Pichai reportedly stated that he intends to increase Google’s efficiency by 20% over the course of many years as he deals with concerns such as challenging economic times and frequent hiring.
The Google CEO provided information about the company’s plans to be more effective in the face of economic uncertainty and a general slowdown in ad expenditure while speaking at the Code Conference in Los Angeles.
“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it. The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on,” Sundar Pichai said.
Sundar Pichai agreed that Google had been “slower” as a result of its increased staff but added that he had no control over macroeconomic aspects.
Sundar Pichai further added, “We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritising all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have an impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on. Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions. You look at it end-to-end and figure out how to make the company 20% more productive.”
The Google CEO gave specific examples of how he intended to move forward with this. Sundar Pichai also provided examples of how Google Play Music and YouTube Music were combined into a single offering.
“Sometimes there are areas to make progress (where) you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%,” Sundar Pichai noted.