In a sweeping bid to cut costs, tech behemoth Google has handed pink slips to hundreds of workers within its hardware, voice assistance, and engineering teams. The company has indicated that these layoffs are part of a larger strategy to refocus on core priorities and capitalizing on future opportunities, as stated in a KENS5 report.
Disclosing few specifics, Google acknowledged the terminations, emphasizing the global scale of its organizational reshaping. "Some teams are continuing to make these kind of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally," Google's statement read. The most affected appears to be the augmented reality hardware team, which was earmarked for a 'few hundred' job cuts as per information obtained by ABC7 News.
In a defiant tone, the Alphabet Workers Union has called the layoffs "needless," voicing their protest via X, a social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The union's post lashed out by stating, "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." They vowed to keep up their fight for job security.
It's not an isolated trend: Google's rivals and peers in the tech industry have also been trimming their workforces. In response to investor pressures, Meta, Facebook's parent company, has cut 20,000 positions and enjoyed a nearly 178% jump in stock price in 2023. Amazon too has been on the downsizing journey, recently announcing hundreds of job cuts in its Prime Video and studios, and Twitch units, in addition to a staggering 27,000 layoffs previously reported by the company this year. These layoffs echo a larger pattern observed across the technology sector as it maneuvers through post-pandemic shifts and intensified competition.
This wave of cutbacks comes amidst a hotly contested race in the field of artificial intelligence where Google and Microsoft are fiercely vying for dominance. In a strategic move, Microsoft has been actively enhancing its AI capabilities, launching an AI-powered Copilot for its corporate customers' use within its Bing search engine, Edge browser, and Windows, illustrating the intensifying competition between the two giants.
