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Alphabet cuts 12.000 jobs.

 Google’s par­ent com­pany will axe 12,000 staff, push­ing total tech job losses in the past 12 months

Google

above 200,000, as industry bosses con­cede they over­ex­ten­ded dur­ing the pan­demic’s digital boom. The industry-wide cull has affected over 50,000 people across four Big Tech com­pan­ies, including Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Apple is the largest tech com­pany yet to announce any sig­ni­fic­ant cuts. Even before the announce­ment from Alpha­bet, Google’s owner, more than 193,000 jobs had already gone at tech groups glob­ally since the start of 2022, accord­ing to estim­ates from Lay­offs.

«Over the past two years, we’ve seen peri­ods of dra­matic growth,» Alpha­bet chief exec­ut­ive Sundar Pichai wrote in a let­ter to employ­ees. His admis­sion is the latest by a Sil­icon Val­ley exec­ut­ive that tech com­pan­ies erred in the wake of the pan­demic by bet­ting on con­tin­ued stel­lar growth in sec­tors ran­ging from advert­ising to remote work­ing. Alpha­bet’s shares rose 4.5 per cent in mid­day trade yes­ter­day. The latest cuts will affect about 6 per cent of the work­force at Alpha­bet, which also owns autonom­ous car com­pany Waymo, health­care ven­ture Ver­ily and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research­ers Deep­Mind.

Pichai said the roles being elim­in­ated would «cut across Alpha­bet, product areas, func­tions, levels and regions». However, those cuts rep­res­ent fewer than half of the 36,751 staff that Alpha­bet added in the year to Septem­ber 2022, the most recent quarter for which fig­ures are avail­able. Alpha­bet’s total head­count had swelled by about 57 per cent since the begin­ning of 2020, to more than 185,000 in Septem­ber. Since the end of 2019, Amazon’s worker count has nearly doubled, while Microsoft’s work­force grew in 2022 by more than double the pre­vi­ous year.

Sil­icon Val­ley giants con­tin­ued their hir­ing last year on the assump­tion the his­toric surge in digital demand would endure. What is less straightforward is know­ing how to lessen these soci­etal harms without tramp­ling over free speech. On both sides of the Atlantic, law­makers are grap­pling with the best ways of mak­ing Big Tech more account­able. The long-awaited online safety bill, which prom­ises to make the UK the «safest place in the world to be online», was amended this week after Con­ser­vat­ive rebel MPs pushed for the top brass of Big Tech firms to face jail time if they fail to pro­tect under-18s from harm­ful con­tent.

The rebels point to sim­ilar liab­il­ity for bosses under health and safety legis­la­tion and those in fin­ance. They add that if senior man­agers who work in sec­tors that can wreak wider dam­age face crim­inal sanc­tions, then so should those at the top of Big Tech. The crim­inal amend­ment pushed by the rebels is mod­elled on exist­ing Irish legis­la­tion. Mean­while, the EU’s Digital Ser­vices Act also places sim­ilar require­ments on Big Tech to remove illegal con­tent.

In the US, law­makers have been slower to grasp the nettle, even if politi­cians on both sides of the aisle want to curb Big Tech. Pres­id­ent Joe Biden has called for a bipar­tisan effort to bet­ter pro­tect pri­vacy and to dimin­ish the «liab­il­ity shield» of sec­tion 230 of the 1996 Com­mu­nic­a­tions Decency Act, which gave tech plat­forms immunity for con­tent oth­ers post on their sites. The court’s full docket, along with Elon Musk’s efforts at Twit­ter to roll back con­tent mod­er­a­tion in the name of free speech, mean that law­makers, judges and reg­u­lat­ors on both sides of the Atlantic will be busy determ­in­ing just where the line between free speech and harm­ful con­tent lies.

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Comments

  1. Aiden21 January 2023 at 12:56

    Especially since I think a good part of them might have been hired in the past 1-2 years with Google and other such companies.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tom21 January 2023 at 13:35

    Yes, that is a lot but keep in mind that all these companies have hired a lot more people in the past 2-3 years. Some (or all) have highered too many and now they need to lay off some of them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Max21 January 2023 at 15:54

    Where does the line between free speech and harm­ful con­tent lie? How can one or more people decide this for the rest of us? It's a very, very hard thing to do and it will certainly lead to heated discussions or problems.

    ReplyDelete

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