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Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees (www.theverge.com)
submitted 7 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/technology@beehaw.org
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But there may be more, and it’s possible that Google is attempting to spread out the bad news instead of having it hit all at once.

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[-] megopie@beehaw.org 38 points 7 months ago

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.”

[-] Contend6248@feddit.de 36 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

"Google parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total."

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.

[-] megopie@beehaw.org 11 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] averagedrunk@lemmy.ml 8 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] megopie@beehaw.org 9 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] ptsdstillinmymind@lemmy.studio 12 points 7 months ago

Infinite growth is part of the reason Capitalism sucks. There is no way any company can grow infinitely.

[-] Thalestr@beehaw.org 8 points 7 months ago

Which is exactly why they want people wearing smartwatches to sleep.

[-] Titan@beehaw.org 6 points 7 months ago

The boom bust cycles in this industry have extremely high rates. There'll be another boom in like 3 years

[-] 1984@lemmy.today 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

As soon as it becomes possible to make people dream about specific ads in exchange for money, it will take off in any poorer countries....

I hate ads.

[-] hedge@beehaw.org 4 points 7 months ago

Isn't there a Max Headroom episode like that? (Checks IMDb) There is!

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 7 months ago

I had no idea the entirety of Max Headroom was available to stream off the Internet Archive! Oddly enough, searching on there for "max headroom" doesn't return any results, so I'd never have stumbled across it by looking.

[-] HubertManne@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago

I mean it was definately a thing in that futurama episode

[-] TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 11 points 7 months ago

They could save $226 million per year by cutting the fat at the very top.

[-] PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social 8 points 7 months ago

AI can easily replace upper and middle management.

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 7 months ago

I don't think they bat an eye at less than a billion these days. Their operating income for Q3 2023 alone was apparently $21.3 billion.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 6 points 7 months ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summaryGoogle just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of “few.”

We asked Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the complete and total number of job cuts in this round of layoffs, but she stopped replying at that point, only confirming existing layoff reports at 9to5Google and Semafor.

The New York Times reported on the engineering team layoffs too.

When we spoke to Mencini earlier this evening about the Google hardware layoffs, she did not mention the other layoffs — but did write that “a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better” and that “some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”

Google parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total.

Update January 11th, 8:35AM ET: Removed speculation about the origin of other reports on Google’s layoffs.

Saved 32% of original text.

[-] toothpicks@beehaw.org 5 points 7 months ago

Someone posted this a week ago lol

[-] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 7 months ago

The council is concerned about the economy heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire 500000.

this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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