Google will not be spared by the current restructurings affecting GAFAM, and more generally, new technologies. The firm has announced that it is letting go of several hundred employees, mainly impacting the company’s Pixel, Nest and Fitbit divisions.
While yesterday, the branch of the Amazon group dedicated to livestreaming, Twitch, announced that it was letting go of almost a third of its employees, it is another of the GAFAM which is standing out today for the same reason: Google is indeed announcing cutting hundreds of jobs across the world, and in various different divisions. Suffice to say that the world of tech is not in the best shape.
Hundreds of employees laid off
Google is restructuring, to the detriment of its employees. The firm, one of the most powerful in the world, announced this Wednesday the dismissal of several hundred employees across many different teams, including the Fitbit division, which was purchased for 2.1 billion in 2021. Dedicated to sales of smartwatches and health/fitness tools, Fitbit directly competed with the Pixel Watch, which Google continued to establish as a regular product to pair with its Google Pixel smartphones. Thus, among the employees dismissed by the American giant, the co-founders of Fitbit, James Park and Eric Friedman, were not spared.
In addition to the Fitbit division, the Pixel & Nest teams are also affected by hundreds of layoffs, including big cuts to the team dedicated to augmented reality. For Reuters, a Google spokesperson explains these budget cuts: “ In the second half of 2023, our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better to align resources with greater product priorities: some teams continue to make these types of changes in terms of organization, which notably includes job cuts on a global scale “.
The testimony of a global crisis in tech
This situation is far from being unique: the world of new technologies is in a global phase of restructuring, particularly with the arrival feared by many employees of artificial intelligence in the professional context. Microsoft and Google are among the companies most affected by these restructurings on a global scale, but they are not the only ones: the Twitch case presented yesterday goes in the same direction. Faced with less costly automation, tech giants therefore seem to be choosing to favor AI over their more expensive traditional workforce.
Source : Reuters
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