Google’s post-pandemic transition has not spared several of its crucial divisions, including the Google Hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit products.
However, it appears that the impact extends further, affecting Google’s core engineering and Google Assistant teams as well. In a recent announcement, Google officially acknowledged that it has made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce by “a few hundred” positions in each of these divisions. When considering a reasonable interpretation of “few,” this amounts to approximately a thousand employees being affected by these layoffs on a single Wednesday.
The layoffs didn’t stop there as Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini refused to comment on questions related to the matter. This means reports from publishers including The New York Times, 9to5Google, and others regarding the engineering team are true.
While she did not comment on the additional layoffs around the company, she did comment that:
A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better and some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.
It’s worth considering that there might be additional changes underway, and Google may be opting to stagger the release of this less favorable news instead of having it all come out at once. It came to light during the Epic v. Google trial that Google is one of the companies that endeavors to strategically influence news stories.
It is worth mentioning that the new stories from 9to5Google and Semafor about Google’s hardware team layoffs came at around exactly the same time.
Speaking of a broader perspective, it’s important to remember that Google is a massive corporation. Alphabet, its parent company, had a workforce of 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023. Therefore, even with around a thousand job reductions, it would only account for roughly half a percent of the company’s overall workforce.
