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Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Technology
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Another drop of blood in the water. tech is no longer a boom industry. The hopes of infinite growth have been dashed on the reality that there is a fixed amount of time people can spend on phones, computers and tablets in a day. Meanwhile the anxious suits are saying “but is there anyway we could get people to not sleep? That’s be an additional 8 hours we could be showing them adds and harvesting their data.”
This is just a normal optimization, and holy fuck are they huge.
During the pandemic everyone was over-hiring, it doesn't exactly tell you what you've wrote, but you are right as a whole.
I think this is likely the first in a lot more cuts to come. Google probably does not want to do it all at once though, potentially because that would be a huge red flag for the whole industry and hurt the confidence of investors in the industry as a whole.
Given that Google makes most of their money by selling services to other parts of the industry, and a lot of the industry runs solely on the confidence of investors, doing a bunch of big cuts all at once would harm them. But they do need to cut back a lot more long term, because investor money is drying up to feed the companies that buy services from Google.
Yep. A lot of these tech companies that have run in the red for years are now being called on to produce a profit and pay the big backers.
The funny thing is, that most of the one who do make a profit, do so by selling goods and services to those not making a profit, and if all the unprofitable ones disappeared the “profitable” ones would suddenly be unprofitable as well.