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Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance, and engineering teams of the Google Assistant and across other parts of the company’s knowledge and information product teams. The California-based company has said that the retrenchments are part of cost-cutting measures.
Job cuts were also made by Google in its devices and services departments. A sizeable chunk of these layoffs is in the augmented reality hardware. Several hundred jobs were also affected in the firm’s central engineering department.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the Mountain View-based company said in a statement, as reported by Patch. The statement added that the changes were made to improve efficiency and align resources with product priorities. The cuts were made following pledges by executives of Google and its parent company Alphabet to reduce costs. A year ago, Google had announced that it would lay off 12,000 employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce.
The job cuts have been made because Google’s core internet search business is facing competition from the AI products of rival companies like Microsoft Corp. and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. On calls with investors in recent months, Google executives pledged to scrutinize their operations to identify places where they can make cuts, and free up resources to invest in their biggest priorities.
Like Google other technology companies too are cutting manpower. In 2023, Meta — the parent company of Facebook — slashed more than 20,000 jobs to reassure investors. Meta’s stock price gained about 178 percent in 2023. Spotify said in December that it was axing 17 percent of its global workforce, the music streaming service’s third round of layoffs in 2023 as it moved to slash costs and improve its profitability.
Earlier this week, Amazon laid off hundreds of employees in its Prime Video and studios units. The firm has plans to lay off about 500 employees who work on its livestreaming platform Twitch. Amazon has cut thousands of jobs after a hiring surge during the pandemic. In March, Amazon announced that it planned to lay off 9,000 employees, on top of 18,000 employees it said that it would lay off in January 2023.
“Tonight, Google began another round of needless layoffs,” the Alphabet Workers Union posted on social media. “Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our coworkers while making billions every quarter. We won’t stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”
