It seems that every January after the festivities of the holidays begin to fade and the winter chill settles in, tech companies begin their rounds of layoffs.
Google said on Wednesday that it laid off a few hundred people from its central engineering team, a few hundred people in the Google Assistant team, and a few hundred people from its AR and DSPA teams. If you follow my math (or the Verge’s ) that’s probably about a thousand people who lost their jobs on Wednesday.
Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are leaving the company as well, according to Reuters.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Mashable. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally. We’re continuing to support any impacted employees as they look for new roles here at Google and beyond.”
This isn’t the first time a large round of layoffs hit Google in the month of January. In January of 2023, Google laid off approximately 12,000 employees. At the time, U.S. employees received a severance package starting at 16 weeks’ salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google. It’s unclear how fat the severance package is for the employees laid off today.