In an attempt to cut costs, Google fired hundreds of workers across the company on Wednesday. According to Google, the job layoffs ran across the hardware, engineering teams, and Google Assistant workers, including other parts of the company not specified.
According to a spokesperson in a talk with CNBC, Google is moving to “push for efficiency and top product priorities”, hence the reason for the staff cut going in hundreds on Wednesday night.
This marks Google’s latest effort to cut costs as it plans to stop the rapid growth of employees gathered during the 2020 COVID pandemic.
The last time the company took such drastic measures was in January 2023, when they proceeded to lay off 12,000 people. This brought about more reduction in the recruitment and new department later that year.
The Google Direction
In recent times, Google has shifted its focus to the development of its AI products, such as the large language model Gemini and the chatbot Bard as it focuses on being on top of this trend ahead of its competition, such as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.
A Google spokesperson in a statement to CNBC, made the following comments. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams must make changes to become more efficient and work better and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role elimination globally.”
At the end of the Thursday markets, shares of Alphabet, the company that owns Google, closed down less than 1%. The Alphabet Workers Union also expressed their deep disappointment with the company’s recent layoffs.
In a statement issued on X, the Union described the Wednesday act by the company as ‘needless’, stating that the Google team works hard every day to build products for its users and the company cannot continue to fire co-workers while making billions every quarter.
