Google laid off hundreds of its employees on Wednesday January 10 in the voice-activated Google Assistant team as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring, and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
This came after Fitbit’s co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman left Google as part of the restructuring, as was confirmed by the company. Google which had 182,000 employees in September 30, 2023 has now been significantly reduced after the massive cuts.
Google also let go of most of its AR hardware team and will work with other OEMs as reported by 9to5Google. The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
The Alphabet Worker Union, felt that the layoffs were not necessary and that the company “can’t continue to fire our coworkers while making billions.” They shared this sentiment in an X post.

In a statement by a Google spokesperson, the company shared that the motivation behind their decision to let employees go, was to position themselves to be more efficient and work better, and to align with their resources to their biggest product priorities. The statement read:
“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”

As reported by Semafor, Google has also let go of team members working on the Google Assistant team.

Towards the end of last year Google started infusing AI-powered features in Google Assistant through Bard in order to expand Assistant “beyond voice.”
Last year alone, Google let go of employees in the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September and its news division in October and 12,000 other roles in January 2023.