Tech giant Google has again announced more job cuts to reduce its additional expenditures by hiring cheap labor outside the United States.
The latest round of layoffs has affected employees across essential teams like Flutter, Dart, Python, and others, according to reports shared by affected employees on social media (via TechCrunch).
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” Alex García-Kummert, a Google spokesperson, confirmed to TechCrunch about the layoffs in three internal teams.
“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.
While the company did not confirm the exact number of employees who have been laid off or will be terminated in the future, it did clarify reorganization as the primary reason behind the layoffs.
Impacted employees from the Flutter and Dart teams shared their disappointment about the job cuts on social media platforms.
Kevin Moore, a Google Product Manager for Flutter and Dart, posted on Reddit: “The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams. (I think I can say that).
Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people. Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less [than] others. It was a tough day… tough week.”
He added, “We’re sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond. We know ya’ll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we’ve built together. You’re nervous. I get it. We get it. You’re betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google.”
According to Google, the employees laid off mainly dealt with programming languages. The company will give sufficient time to apply for other open roles within any other internal department of the company or outside of it, access to outplacement services and severance.
As part of the layoff exercise, Google terminated around 12,000 employees in the year 2023 and laid off hundreds of employees in the first four months of 2024.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has already warned that 2024 will see layoffs happening in a phased manner.
