The layoffs continue: Google announces another round of job cuts, moves roles to other countries

Google is laying off an unspecified number of employees, marking the technology giant’s latest job cuts as it reduces costs.

According to a Business Insider report on Wednesday (17 April), employees across several of Google’s teams in its real estate and finance departments have been affected. The finance teams affected include Google’s Treasury, Business Services, and Revenue Cash Operations.

It’s unclear if other parts of the company are affected or how many roles have been cut, however, one current employee said the changes were “pretty large-scale”.

When contacted by Reuters, a company spokesperson said that the layoffs are not company-wide and that the affected employees will be able to apply for internal roles. The spokesperson did not specify the number of employees impacted.

Additionally, a small percentage of the impacted roles will move to hubs the company is investing in, which include India, Chicago, Atlanta and Dublin.

Making changes to become “more efficient”

Google has been cutting staff and reorganising the company throughout 2023 and this year as it attempts to cut costs and accelerate its progress in emerging technologies such as AI.

“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,” said the Google spokesperson.

At the beginning of 2023, the Alphabet-owned company cut over 12,000 jobs, including 190 roles from its Singapore office.

Most recently, Google laid off hundreds of workers across multiple teams, including those in its engineering, hardware and assistant teams as the company looks to automate work processes by adopting AI.

These job cuts will continue throughout the year, warned CEO Sundar Pichai earlier this year, but they would not impact every team.

Alphabet’s other companies, including Verily, have also chopped head count.

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