After Google laid off hundreds of employees last week, mainly in the hardware sector, hundreds of jobs are now being cut again. This time, teams responsible for selling advertising are affected. Primarily it concerns employees who work in the sales department for major customers. At the same time, the sales departments are being restructured.
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A few days ago, other areas of the company were affected, such as Google Assistant, hardware – including Fitbit – and internal software tools. Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are expected to leave the company as part of restructuring, it is said, after Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion in 2021. Now they are among the hundreds of hardware employees that Google is laying off.
Google cancels major customer sales
While Google and its parent company Alphabet did not quantify the extent of the job cuts, a Google spokesman confirmed the recent restructuring of the sales teams told The Verge. “We match customers with the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs,” explains Google spokesman Chris Pappas. “As a result, several hundred jobs will be cut worldwide and affected employees will be able to apply for open positions or elsewhere at Google.”
Previously had Business Insider Based on an internal memo from Google’s Senior Vice President Philipp Schindler, reports that the layoffs will primarily be carried out in “Large Customer Sales” (LCS), whose employees handle the line items from major customers. The so-called “Google Customer Solutions” (GCS) team, on the other hand, is responsible for advertising for smaller customers, but is now becoming the core team for selling advertising.
Layoffs in 2024 will probably be fewer and more targeted
Although Google doesn’t provide exact numbers, the job cuts this week and last week are expected to affect more than a thousand employees combined. Amazon also cut hundreds of jobs at the beginning of this year, at Prime Video and the acquired MGM studios. In addition, there are around 500 job cuts at Amazon subsidiary Twitch, where one in three Twitch employees has to leave.
The “Year of Efficiency” announced by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of 2023 has already come to an end, but the companies in the Big Tech industry apparently want to further reduce their costs. Observers and experts leave according to Reuters However, the layoffs are not expected to reach the level of last year, when almost 170,000 jobs were eliminated in the industry. Instead, the cuts are likely to be smaller and more targeted, for example to offset the costs of investments in artificial intelligence.
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