Despite reporting a substantial year-on-year increase in net profit, Google has reportedly initiated a new round of layoffs affecting engineers on a number of its development teams.
A report by The Register suggests that the Python team is among the most affected, alongside an undisclosed number of engineers from the Flutter and Dart projects.
In the most recent quarter, Google’s Alphabet reported a 15% year-on-year jump in revenue to $80.5 billion, with CEO Sundar Pichai thanking generative AI advancements for many of the company’s successes.
Google lays off more workers
A Reddit user claiming to be Kevin Moore, a Google Product Manager, posted: “The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams.” The user added: “Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people.”
Flutter, an open-source UI toolkit, had been making strides in enabling developers to build cross-platform apps, but now, speculation is arising regarding its fate.
Though the news is very much unwelcome by those affected, it was likely weeks in the making – Google’s Pichai hinted at more layoffs to come when the company reduced its headcount by around 1,000 workers in January 2024. Since then, a number of other smaller-scale layoffs have followed.
Speaking to The Register, a Google spokesperson claimed that the company was “responsibly investing in [its] biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead.”
“To best position us for these opportunities, 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.”
