Up to 20 employees working on Google's Assistant team have been cut.

Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant::Up to 20 employees working on Google’s Assistant team have been cut.

  • @malloc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102•8 months ago

    Seems like all Fortune 500 companies are laying off 5-10% of their staff every year to pump end of year report.

    Have seen cuts across multiple industries. Not just tech.

    • @andallthat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      38•8 months ago

      Have seen that too. The canned press release from all of them is something like “as part of our continued effort to make the org more efficient we have aggregated tram X with team Y and as a result a handful of roles were no longer needed. Our company remains focused and confident in our growth”. Has AI taken over the PR department too?

      From what I can see, this is not even about individual performance. It looks like a continuous game of musical chair where an entire team here and there is suddenly decimated or completely removed with non-existent internal communication.

      • @flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        14•8 months ago

        They find it easier/cheaper to lay off a bunch of people and then hire again.

        Hiring costs for new people don’t factor in financial reports apparently.

        • qazEnglish
          12•8 months ago

          Hiring is “investment”, wages are “expenses”.

      • @Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6•8 months ago

        The bigger the company, the more they see people as just a headcount. Your performance doesn’t matter, your name is unknown, you’re not even a number, you are 1 of x number of y’s.

      • @malloc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•8 months ago

        Most of f500 is overrated. At a certain point, only driving the stonk is the main motivator to do anything.

    • @GissaMittJobb@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7•8 months ago

      So according to a quick search, Google employs ~ 178k people, making this far less than 5-10%.

      But yeah, cuts keep happening until interest rates start trending downwards again, basically.