Google To Lay-Off Hundreds Of Staff, Amazon To Follow (Image: X.com/GoogleIndia/header_photo)Tech giant Alphabet Inc.’s Google is to lay-off hundreds of staff from its workforce. This move is in tally with its continued drive to cut down the costs. The company said that the cut would affect workers working with the voice-based Google Assistant, augmented reality hardware team and also the workers with the company’s central engineering organization.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said, “throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” and that, “some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
The matter about the lay-offs in Google Assistant team was first reported by the global news platform, Semafor and the matter about the reorganisation in the hardware team was first reported by 9to5Google. The company said that the workers who have been affected by this change, can apply for other positions which are open elsewhere at Google, reported the NDTV.
There is dissonance on the lay-off plans of Google within the company. The Alphabet Workers Union, which is the workers union of the company, representing its employees, have posted a statement on its X handle, criticising the lay-off decision.
The X handle post said, “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!”
Google said that the majority of the lay-off would affect the 1P AR hardware team. The 9to5Google reported that as part of the elimination move, James Park and Eric Friedman, who are the co-founders of Google’s Fitbit, will be leaving the team along with some other leaders of the group. Though these details are available on 9to5 Google, as of now, there are no clear indications on the number of workers who would leave the team. In September last year, 2023, Alphabet’s workforce numbered 182,381 employees around the world, said the Business Standard.
Meanwhile, similar moves are being taken by Amazon and Unity Software. Unity Software, which is a videogame software provider, said in a regular filing that, it would be cutting approximately 25 percent of its workforce, which would add up to 1,800 jobs in the company, reported the mint.
Amazon has also set to lay-off hundreds of its staff members, which would mostly affect staff working with Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. Senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, Mike Hopkins said, “we’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.” This lay-off decision follows the last year, 2023’s huge job cut, which amounted to almost 27,000 cuts. In 2023, Google had eliminated close to 12,000 employees, which is seen as the biggest in the history of the company in a single year, reported the Business Standard.