OAN’s Abril Elfi
5:00 PM – Thursday, January 11, 2024
Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, engineering and voice-assistant teams due to cost-cutting measures.
The company released a statement saying that the cuts are due to “responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead.”
“Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” the statement read.
Although the majority of the effects were felt by the company’s augmented reality hardware division, Google had previously announced that it was cutting a few hundred positions across the engineering, hardware, and Assistant teams.
The layoffs come after Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and its executives promised to cut expenses. Google announced a year ago that it would lay off 12,000 workers, or roughly 6% of its total workforce.
Google announced that it would deprecate 17 “underutilized” features of Google Assistant, such as playing audiobooks, sending emails, and initiating voice-activated meditation sessions with Calm, on the same day that news of the cutbacks broke.
The Alphabet Workers Union called the job cuts “another round of needless layoffs” in a post on X.
“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,” the union wrote. “We won’t stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”
In the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, Google saw record growth. However, as this growth has slowed over the past year, the company has had to modify its business projections.
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