Google is firing developers despite record revenues

By James On Apr 30, 2024

Despite reporting a substantial year-over-year increase in net profit, Google has reportedly initiated a new round of layoffs, affecting engineers in some of its development teams.

A report from The register suggests that the Python team is among the hardest hit, along with an undisclosed number of engineers from the Flutter and Dart projects.

In its most recent quarter, Google’s Alphabet reported a 15% year-on-year revenue increase to $80.5 billion, with CEO Sundar Pichai crediting generative AI developments for many of the company’s successes.

Google is laying off more employees

A Reddit user claiming to be Kevin Moore, a Google product manager, Posted: “The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a few levels above our team and affected MANY teams.” The user added: “Many good people got bad news and many great projects lost people.”

Flutter, an open-source UI toolkit, had made strides in enabling developers to build cross-platform apps, but now speculation is swirling about its fate.

While the news is deeply unwelcome by those affected, it was likely weeks in the making – Google’s Pichai hinted that more layoffs were coming when the company reduced its workforce by around 1,000 employees in January 2024. Large-scale layoffs have followed.

Speaking to The Register, a Google spokesperson asserted that the company was “investing responsibly in (its) biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead.”

“To best position ourselves for these opportunities, a number of our teams have made changes in the second half of 2023 and into 2024 to become more efficient and work better, removing layers and aligning their resources on their biggest product priorities.”