Google Lays Off Its News Director, Madhav Chinnappa; Check What He Wrote On LinkedIn – News18

Google has laid off its Director of News Ecosystem Development, Madhav Chinnappa, who worked at the Mountain View-based company for 13 years. Madhav has taken to social media platform LinkedIn to write a long post about his time at Google, thanking his teammates and colleagues and saying that he will miss them. He also discussed some of the highlights of his work at Google.

Before his stint at Google, Madhav was the Head of Business Development & Rights at BBC.

You can read the full post here:

“I am on gardening leave at the moment which allows too much time to contemplate work, career, life etc. In the end, I am proud of what I have been able to achieve during my almost 13 years at Google from:

– #DigitalNewsInitiative (which wasn’t just a Fund – though a wise person did say that it helped kickstart a European media R&D culture – and the product plus training & research elements never got the credit I thought they deserved!) to

– the #googlenewsinitiative Innovation Challenges

– and of course Ludovic Blecher’s brilliant idea: #JERF, the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund which showcased the best of Google: helping where it could when a vulnerable part of the news ecosystem needed it most and involving ~300 Googlers

– and aside from getting #NewsGeist to go global, I am also inordinately proud of somehow convincing the Doodle team to do a Eurovision Doodle!

(as I seem to have forgotten/lost the ability to insert links, please contact me if you have any questions on anything mentioned above or anything else!)

And to be clear, not a single thing I mentioned above could have been achieved without my teammates and colleagues as everything is a team effort. There are too many to mention but they are a special bunch and I will miss them all!

And what now: I am in the privileged position of being able some time to figure that out. In the near term, I have some pressing family issues that need my fuller attention so in the spirit of the Zen proverb that the tea cup must be empty before it can be full, I will take August off then spend September looking after my mum in India and only start thinking about work in October with a view to doing more things in 2024.

Though if you have any ideas or thoughts, please message me as I am all ears and have more time on my hands now!

Thank you if you made it all the way down here and have a lovely summer and take care – Madhav”

Google Had Fired 12,000 Employees Back In January

In January 2023, Google laid off approximately 12,000 employees. Google CEO Sundar Pichai took “full responsibility” for the decision and suggested that the company may have over-hired in the past two years, when it experienced “periods of dramatic growth.” Pichai said that Google needed to “match and fuel that growth” by hiring more employees, but that the company now faces a different economic reality and needs to reduce its workforce.

Layoffs have lately become common in the tech industry, with companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft reducing their workforce. Some companies have blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for over-hiring, as the world returns to normal.