this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees (www.theverge.com)
submitted 10 months ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So it continues.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.”

I'm getting really tired of corpo doublespeak. No Google shill, I don't believe you are becoming more efficient, or right sizing, or whatever euphemism you think will soothe me over. You're fucking firing people. Call it for what it is.

[–] tal 1 points 10 months ago

You're fucking firing people.

While I agree with the use of positive phrasing having the ability to go over the top, I think that this goes too far the other way. "Firing" normally refers to a termination where the driving factor is that the individual employee was at fault. "Layoffs" normally refer to where that's not the case, that the driving factor is a change in the business enviornment.

If someone always shows up for work an hour late, they might be fired for that. If a company shuts down a division that's been losing money, that's laying the employees off.

It's unlikely that a thousand people all did something wrong simultaneously.

[–] StenSaksTapir@feddit.dk 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This can only mean that Google is about to axe a product that people like and instead introduce a new chat app.

[–] DarkFox@pawb.social 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They have. They've announced they're going to cut a bunch of features from Assistant.

[–] Lells@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

@DarkFox That's good to hear, it wasn't shitty enough as it was.

@Powderhorn @StenSaksTapir

[–] XTornado@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They probably want to join it with Bard or similar.

[–] DarkFox@pawb.social 1 points 10 months ago

Very true. It's been months since I've used it for anything other than replying to messages on Android Auto.

[–] Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I guess they're rather impatient about the promised economic depression so everyone hop on the layoff train to accelerate it.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 8 points 10 months ago

I think it also had to do something with Google Assistant that get replaced by LLMs, as stated in the article.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 points 10 months ago

Spyware company not doing so hot as expected, has to justify existence to investors.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

“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.”

That sounds like they're eliminating some profile globally. I wonder which particular role they don't need anymore, that required a profile so specific that they couldn't reassign those people to some other role.

How ironic would it be, to learn that they finally managed to fully replace some profile with an AI, so they no longer need humans for that role?

[–] meteorswarm@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months ago

It's mostly software engineers, and distributed across almost every team.

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I smell a recession forming!

[–] zaphod@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you're so sure you should run off and short the S&P 500.

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The only thing I'm sure of is death and taxes.

I'm risking that statement because I'm seeing a good deal of events similar to what happened the last time we went through one (the world) and the big companies starting to let go people is like the canary in the mine.

[–] zaphod@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Because FAANG is the entire economy? Please.

Step out of the SV bubble and you'll see the economy is fine. The fact that tech was dumb and overextended themselves during and shortly after COVID while relying on ZIRP to fund those expenditures doesn't mean everyone else did. Stir in changes to tax treatment around R&D that disproportionately impact tech and and no one should be surprised that industry might be getting hit while the rest of the economy ticks on just fine.

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You are going to have to unfold all of those acronyms before we can move forward with this conversation.

I don't have the palest of ideas of what you are trying to convey.

[–] zaphod@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

ZIRP - zero interest rate policy. Very common term for anyone following macroeconomic policy since 2008.

Given the group we're in I hope I don't have to explain the rest.

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 3 points 10 months ago

the group we’re in

This esteemed Lemmy community of experts in technology news (that are mostly Muskrat memes, new phone apps and news about companies that may have had an app at some point).

I think you're somehow setting too high a bar for the average internet user. Don't worry, it's hard not to.

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Thank you.

But... Why do you assume I have instant knowledge of acronyms because I opted to insert a comment on a topic that teased my interest? Does it pressuposes anything about my person?

[–] toothpicks@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago

Nice abbreviations!

[–] coffeetest@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Last global recession generally considered 2020 I believe i.e. covid. Before that 2008/9 sub-prime housing. I don't see either of those events happening now. Could you be more specific?

[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Good morning.

Let's call that example the canary in the mine but I'm seeing many similar situations where I live.

Being in a less than urban area, there is still a bit of industry around and some factories are cutting staff and a few have already shut down operations, especially in sectors more closely related with end user products (clothing, footwear, yarn, etc). Industries with ties to industrial use (metal working, construction materials, wood and derivates) are keeping afloat but only replacing workers that go into retirement or that for some reason or another just quit, and these industries, in my understanding, are keeping afloat because of the hard push into more sustainable and efficient houses, which is forcing a good deal of public investment into large renovation projects and funds.

Parallel to this, bakeries, coffee shops, small businesses that rely on consumption, are shutting down. For me, this implies there is less money floating around.

Paired with the hike in housing...

[–] coffeetest@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for your observations and I won't argue them. The problem with a word like recession is that we're in what I see as, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. The middle class, what's left of it, is mainly moving toward being poor. That said, the "smart" economy people will say "we are not in a recession and in fact the economy is good." And it is good, very good in fact - for the privileged. Wealth inequality is the issue, at least in my view.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. This person is noticing a local recession and believes the entire world is like their small town. It isn't.

Recessions have causes and "housing expensive" is not a cause. In a recession everyone loses, not just "some factory workers" or "people who rent". This person is describing the effects of situational unemployment, which can hurt small towns reliant on only one industry.

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Anecdotally, I know some people working in a paper mill who make essential materials for the world's sticker tags, you know, the things that get put on absolutely anything and everything that gets shipped or sold everywhere globally. This factory is one of a very few globally in this ultra-niche industry.

They said that the KYC they are doing now shows their clients globally overstating their manufacturing since the pandemic by a lot. Somehow, everyone has lost 20-40% of their turnover while producing the same financial results. I know this is multiple layers of trust me bro stuff, but still.

There is a lot of pressure and lies in the global economy right now, more than usual. I don't think we ever recovered from the "pandemic downturn", which actually was much more than just the pandemic, it was war, it was idiocy, it was much more things at the same time.

I guess what I'm saying is that the economy is not well, it has never been well since at least 2020, and people keep lying. The US was never in a recession if you listen to the White House, only if you listen to your eyes looking at the actual numbers.

And I'm saying this as someone who is not interested in more chaos, quite the opposite.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Somehow, everyone has lost 20-40% of their turnover while producing the same financial results.

That's called inflation. And stickers aren't a good way to track the economy. Where do you put the sticker on a service or app?

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

This is mostly about manufacturing, and the global economy. I know most of the US economy is about services, but services depend on goods, and goods depend on manufacturing. How do you sell more apps if people buy fewer phones?

To be fair, all of this is anecdotal. It's just that I see continuous layoffs in service as well, like the article says. I'm hearing manufacturing is similarly depressive. There are and have been huge problems with trade and supply chains, it was the pandemic before, now it's the Yemen thing.

I guess I'm just saying the world economy is not doing well right now. I hope it will get better soon. Also, it's not just the Western world's economy. China is trying to stave off a real estate collapse. Russia is in a war that basically eliminated it as a world power. A lot of South America and Africa is in turmoil. Europe is trying to solve multiple refugee crises simultaneously, while also trying to not go full fascist.

I would just be happy if this did not escalate further. I'm tired.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

How do you sell more apps if people buy fewer phones?

Maybe you don't know this but you can install multiple apps on one phone. And there are a ton of services built into those apps. They don't all build their own payment processor, or security packages, or a ton of other backend things you never see. You just don't see all the b2b services that you use every day.

Then there's all the physical services. People always need haircuts and plumbers. Look at the actual numbers and you'll see that layoffs are quite low now:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t05.htm

Honestly, your thinking appears to be influenced by your personal feelings and not the actual facts. There's always problems in the world. Today's problems seem bigger but that's just recency bias. In the 90s there was literal war and genocide in Europe and around the world. The economy was fine.

[–] coffeetest@beehaw.org 2 points 10 months ago

Google has something like 140k employees (Wikipedia 2021).

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 1 points 10 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.”

If so, though, it won’t work: The Verge is among the news outlets that takes a hard line against planted information, and we pride ourselves on finding the bigger picture.

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.

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