Google lays off hundreds of employees in its engineering, hardware and Google Assistant areas

Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has decided to lay off hundreds of employees in several of its departments, such as central engineering, Google Assistant and the Pixel, Nest and Fitbit hardware team as part of a cost reduction plan, as announced this Thursday by various media.

These departures would follow the 12,000 already executed by Google in January, which affected about 6% of its full-time workforce. Likewise, the technology company also later made cuts in its news and recruiting division.

Google’s intention is to prioritize areas such as artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, it has launched the Bard chatbot or the Gemini AI model to compete with its rivals from Microsoft and Amazon.

“To better position ourselves for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, several of our teams made changes to be more efficient and work better, as well as to align their resources with their highest product priorities,” said a spokesperson for the American network ‘CNBC’, which has acknowledged that the “organizational chart changes” include the elimination of some positions.

For its part, the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA) has called the round of layoffs “unnecessary” and has stated on the social network X, formerly Twitter, that “they will not stop fighting until their jobs are secured.”

Regarding the listing on the New York Nasdaq, Alphabet shares fell 0.78% shortly after noon local time, and were trading at around $141.17 (€128.90) each.

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