Almost a year after Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, announced the layoff of 12,000 employees, things still don’t seem to be going well for one of the largest and richest companies in the world.
Google was one of the many technology companies that significantly increased its workforce during the global COVID-19 lockdowns and, like all of them, ended up “suffering” the consequences of the return to “normality”, resulting in a wave of massive layoffs that continues to advance and destroy jobs.
The problem is that the “new normal” has not only affected the Google Hardware team, responsible for developing Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit, but it has also now affected the engineering teams and Google Assistant.
Google confirmed a few days ago to The Verge that it has eliminated “a few hundred” jobs in each of these divisions, thus confirming the dismissal of nearly a thousand employees, which was previously reported by other media outlets.
And these would not be the only layoffs that have been carried out. When asked by Courtenay Mencini, spokesperson for Google, about whether it was the total number of layoffs made, Mencini stopped responding to The Verge, only confirming the personnel cuts reported by 9to5Google and Semafor. In addition to these, there would be the layoffs of the engineering team, reported by The New York Times.
When speaking with Mencini about the layoffs in Google’s hardware division, the spokesperson did not mention to The Verge the other layoffs, but did write that “several of our teams have made changes to be more efficient and work better” and that “some teams are still making these types of organizational changes, which include some global function eliminations“.
These words would indicate that, indeed, there could be more layoffs and that Google would be spacing out the announcements of the layoffs instead of communicating them all at once. According to The Verge, Alphabet had 182,381 employees as of September 30, 2023, so reducing about a thousand jobs would represent close to half of the company’s total.
