this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Technology

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But there may be more, and it’s possible that Google is attempting to spread out the bad news instead of having it hit all at once.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Another drop of blood in the water. tech is no longer a boom industry. The hopes of infinite growth have been dashed on the reality that there is a fixed amount of time people can spend on phones, computers and tablets in a day. Meanwhile the anxious suits are saying “but is there anyway we could get people to not sleep? That’s be an additional 8 hours we could be showing them adds and harvesting their data.”

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

"Google parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total."

This is just a normal optimization, and holy fuck are they huge.

During the pandemic everyone was over-hiring, it doesn't exactly tell you what you've wrote, but you are right as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think this is likely the first in a lot more cuts to come. Google probably does not want to do it all at once though, potentially because that would be a huge red flag for the whole industry and hurt the confidence of investors in the industry as a whole.

Given that Google makes most of their money by selling services to other parts of the industry, and a lot of the industry runs solely on the confidence of investors, doing a bunch of big cuts all at once would harm them. But they do need to cut back a lot more long term, because investor money is drying up to feed the companies that buy services from Google.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yep. A lot of these tech companies that have run in the red for years are now being called on to produce a profit and pay the big backers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

The funny thing is, that most of the one who do make a profit, do so by selling goods and services to those not making a profit, and if all the unprofitable ones disappeared the “profitable” ones would suddenly be unprofitable as well.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Infinite growth is part of the reason Capitalism sucks. There is no way any company can grow infinitely.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Which is exactly why they want people wearing smartwatches to sleep.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

The boom bust cycles in this industry have extremely high rates. There'll be another boom in like 3 years

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

As soon as it becomes possible to make people dream about specific ads in exchange for money, it will take off in any poorer countries....

I hate ads.