It has been reported that Fitbit is founders left the company as part of a hardware reorganisation.
According to reports from The New York Times, 9to5Mac, Semafor, and other news agencies, Google reduced its workforce by “several hundred” employees across different divisions on Wednesday as part of a new round of layoffs. Hardware (including Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit), core engineering, and Google Assistant are among the subsidiaries that have been impacted. The cuts, which appear to be at least 600 but might be substantially higher, are now in force, and it has been claimed that workers who would be affected have been told.
“We are responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities that lie ahead,” a Google representative said in a statement to the New York Times. “Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organisational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
It has been reported that Google is in the process of reorganising its Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit businesses. Additionally, Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman, along with other executives, are in the process of leaving the company. According to reports, the corporation will have a single team that would be responsible for hardware engineering across all three divisions’ operations.
“We regret to inform you that your position is being eliminated,” the business told certain employees in the core engineering division, according to a note that was viewed by the New York Times. “We’ve had to make some difficult decisions about ongoing employment of some Google employees,” the note read.
There is a lack of clarity over the total number of layoffs because the company did not answer to The Verge’s inquiry about whether or not it has slashed headcount in any other areas. In January of the previous year, Google laid off over 12,000 employees, making it one of the greatest employment cutbacks in the company’s history. As of the end of the previous year, the organisation had employed 182,381 individuals, and as of the beginning of the year 2020, it counted 118,899 workers, which was right before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over two hundred and twenty thousand people were laid off during the course of the year 2023, which was part of a larger decline in employment across the industry. Those came from major corporations such as Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Spotify, and Amazon, in addition to a vast number of small, medium-sized, and startup businesses. In an effort to obtain a comment from Google regarding the layoffs, Newtechmania has contacted out to the company. If necessary, the story will be updated.
In response to the layoffs that occurred on Wednesday, the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA published a statement on Friday, which read as follows:
Over a thousand Google employees were taken aback when they received the news via email that they would be terminated from their positions on Wednesday evening. These terminations are occurring less than a year after Alphabet terminated the employment of 12,000 of our colleagues in 2023, and the terms of severance have only become more severe since then. Layoffs like these are not only needless but also harmful. We know the truth because we see the real repercussions of Alphabet’s layoffs, despite the fact that the company claims it is performing layoffs in the sake of efficiency. As a result of the layoffs, the workplace is now more chaotic and unstable, and employees are being forced to make do with less resources. The true reason for them is straightforward: the avarice of corporations. In the past year, the corporation has achieved a profit of tens of billions of dollars, maintained cash reserves of more than one hundred billion dollars, and increased its stock by forty percent. The compensation of executives has not been affected, despite the fact that thousands of our coworkers have had their lives turned upside down, and those who are still working are working in continual dread that they will be the next ones to be affected.
In order to prevent these layoffs from occurring every January, the only way to prevent them from happening is for all of us at Google to work together and create the power to stop them.