Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 256 points – Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant
businessinsider.com

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.