Seems Google’s postpandemic reckoning didn’t simply hit the Google {Hardware} group accountable for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit merchandise — it’s taken equally sized bites out of Google’s core engineering and Google Assistant groups too. Google simply confirmed to The Verge that it’s eradicated “a number of hundred” roles in every of those divisions, which means Google has confirmed layoffs of round a thousand workers on Wednesday alone, if we use an affordable definition of “few”.
And people are solely the cuts we learn about. We requested Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the entire and complete variety of job cuts on this spherical of layoffs, however she stopped replying at that time, solely confirming present layoff reviews at 9to5Google and Semafor. The New York Occasions reported on the engineering group layoffs too.
After we spoke to Mencini earlier this night in regards to the Google {hardware} layoffs, she didn’t point out the opposite layoffs — however did write that “quite a few our groups made modifications to turn out to be extra environment friendly and work higher” and that “some groups are persevering with to make these sorts of organizational modifications, which embody some function eliminations globally.”
So there could also be extra, and it’s attainable that Google is making an attempt to unfold out the unhealthy information as a substitute of getting it hit abruptly. It turned public through the Epic v. Google trial that Google is among the many corporations that makes an attempt to plant tales to form the information. I discover it… attention-grabbing, not less than, that 9to5Google and Semafor wrote scoops about Google {hardware} layoffs and Google information group layoffs respectively, at across the identical time, every with out mentioning the opposite.
Talking of larger photos, although, Google is a large firm. Mother or father agency Alphabet employed 182,381 workers as of September thirtieth, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would solely be round half a p.c of the corporate’s complete.
If about extra unreported layoffs, please tip us at ideas@theverge.com.