But there may be more, and it’s possible that Google is attempting to spread out the bad news instead of having it hit all at once.

  • “Google parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total.”

    This is just a normal optimization, and holy fuck are they huge.

    During the pandemic everyone was over-hiring, it doesn’t exactly tell you what you’ve wrote, but you are right as a whole.

    • I think this is likely the first in a lot more cuts to come. Google probably does not want to do it all at once though, potentially because that would be a huge red flag for the whole industry and hurt the confidence of investors in the industry as a whole.

      Given that Google makes most of their money by selling services to other parts of the industry, and a lot of the industry runs solely on the confidence of investors, doing a bunch of big cuts all at once would harm them. But they do need to cut back a lot more long term, because investor money is drying up to feed the companies that buy services from Google.