Skip to main content

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.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

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

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

US FED rate rise.

  The US Federal Reserve officials have indicated that they plan to resume increasing interest rates to control inflation in the world's biggest economy. During the June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee reached a consensus to keep interest rates stable for the time being to evaluate whether further tightening of policy would be necessary. However, the majority of the committee anticipates that additional rate increases will be required in the future. The minutes of the meeting have recently been made public. According to the minutes, most participants believed maintaining the federal funds rate at 5 to 5.25 per cent was appropriate or acceptable, despite some individuals wanting to raise the acceleration due to slow progress in cooling inflation. Although Fed forecasts predicted a mild recession starting later in the year, policymakers faced challenges in interpreting data that showed a tight job market and only slight improvements in inflation. Additionally, officials gr...
Post a Comment
Read more

EU business slide.

  S&P Global’s flash eurozone composite purchasing managers’ index, a key gauge of business conditions for the manufacturing and services sector, fell 1 point to 47.1, figures showed yesterday. That is its lowest level since November 2020 and the fourth consecutive month below the crucial 50 mark separating growth from contraction. One of the few bright spots in the survey was that companies in all sectors reported a slight easing of cost pressures, price growth and supply chain constraints. However, prices charged for goods and services still rose at the sixth fastest rate since such data started in 2002. Jobs growth increased marginally from October but remained low compared with the past 18 months. Following a few months of falling price pressure in manufacturing and services, the October print shows an overall stabilisation said Jens Eisenschmidt, chief European economist at Morgan Stanley. However, German businesses, at the hub of Europe’s energy crisis, reported that manu...
1 comment
Read more

Tariffs on UK electric cars.

  The European Commission has confirmed that it will continue with its plan to impose tariffs on electric cars exported between the UK and EU starting next year. This is due to the "rules of origin" requirement that mandates EVs traded across the English Channel to have 60% of their battery and 45% of their parts sourced from the EU or UK or face a 10% tariff. A senior Commission official, Richard Szostak, recently informed parliamentarians from the UK and EU that the bloc's battery investment has significantly declined, making the tariffs necessary to encourage domestic production. In 2022, the EU's share of global investment in battery production shrank from 41% to only 2% after the US offered substantial subsidies through its Inflation Reduction Act. Starting in 2024, car manufacturers in the UK will need to have 22% of their sales come from zero-emission vehicles, which means they may need to import EVs from the continent to meet this requirement. If EU carmakers ...
Post a Comment
Read more