Google is laying off hundreds of people working on its digital assistant, hardware and engineering teams in an effort to cut costs. The company’s union announced on Wednesday night the start of layoffs at the Alphabet Group’s Silicon Valley firm. “Tonight, Google has begun another round of unnecessary layoffs. Our members and team members work hard every day to build the best products for our users, and the company can’t afford to let our colleagues go while making billions every quarter. “We will not stop fighting until our jobs are protected!” tweeted the union, which represents a small portion of Google workers.
Affected workers also include those who work on the Google Voice Assistant and Augmented Reality hardware teams, according to special media. Employees of the company’s central engineering organization have also been affected by the cuts, according to the company. Alphabet, a Google group, has about 182,000 employees.
“In the second half of 2023, many of our teams have made changes to be more efficient and work better, and to align their resources with their highest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement. “Some teams continue to make these types of organizational changes, including some global role eliminations,” he added. According to the company, affected staff have started receiving news and will have the opportunity to apply for open positions in other areas of Google.
It’s been a year since Google’s parent company Alphabet announced it would cut nearly 12,000 jobs worldwide, or about 6% of the workforce, due to the weakening economy, according to group CEO Sundar Pichai. The personnel cuts were the largest in the history of the group, which until then had made only minor adjustments in certain departments and divisions.
Over the past five years, Alphabet has doubled its workforce, from 88,110 employees at the end of 2017 to 190,234 at the end of last year. As of 2020 alone, the company employed more than 50,000 people. After announcing 12,000 layoffs, the company continued to make other small cuts in employee areas, the Waze app, and other products, but also hired more staff in parallel. As of September 30, the workforce numbered nearly 182,000 people.
At Alphabet, the emergence of ChatGPT bots, which Microsoft has opted for, has been seen as a great threat, as there are fears that users will replace many internet searches with queries from artificial intelligence bots, which Google has countered with Bard. In a meeting with investors, Google executives promised to analyze their operations to identify places where they could make cuts and free up resources to invest in their biggest priorities. Overall, the results for the company in the past year have once again been stellar.
Alphabet, the Google group, accelerated its growth in the third quarter of 2023 on the back of good performance in digital advertising and improvements in its cloud computing business. Between July and September of last year, the group achieved revenues of 76,693 million dollars (approximately 72,400 million euros at the current exchange rate), which is 11% more than in the same period of the previous year. The company’s margins improved and net profit rose 41% to $19,689 million, according to accounts published by the company this Tuesday. In the first nine months of 2023 cumulatively, revenue rose 7% to $221,084 million and profit rose 14.6% to $53,108 million, despite severance pay costs for layoffs.
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