Amazon and Google to Both Cut Jobs as Tech Crunch Bites!

With a general global recession and consumers showing more than a little apathy to making new purchases at the moment, it’s hardly surprising that many tech firms haven’t just confirmed relatively poor Q3 financial results, but are also looking to either scale down or find other means of boosting profitability.

Following various online reports, however, it seems that both Amazon and Google are planning some pretty terse redundancies in their technology sectors, albeit, for differing reasons.

Google & Amazon Plan Significant Tech Job Cuts

Starting off with Google, the reasoning for their planned job cuts (via Forbes) is quite easy to understand. While Google might represent itself as a fun and varied place to work (which I’m sure it is in many instances), it has been widely rumoured that both staff and management are regularly monitored in their performance to ensure that they remain as ‘Googly’ as possible.

It is, therefore, understood that Google plans to lay off around 10,000 people (roughly 6% of its entire workforce) in order to help improve efficiency, and, overall, balance the books a little better moving into 2023. – How will they do this? Well, it’s understood that Google managers have been asked to ‘rate’ the staff in their departments and, as above, those at the bottom area will be let go.

Alexa – Cut Jobs For Me Please?

Amazon is a little more different as, unlike Google, they are clearly more retail than technology focused. It is, however, understood (via Arstechnica) that the primary reason for their particular job cuts is to essentially scale back development and research on products such as Alexa. – And, in this regard, there is a valid point as it’s understood that ‘Alexa’ might be costing the giant as much as $10BN a year.

How is this possible I hear you ask? Well, on the surface, yes, Alexa proved to be an incredibly popular device. The problem for Amazon, however, is that after the initial point of sale, there’s practically nothing about it that allows for continued financial growth. It’s, basically, a one and done which requires a lot of additional support (and money) to keep both up-to-date and running. In other words, Amazon never really found a way to monetise poor Alexa.

With competing products from Google and Apple starting to take larger slices of the pie as well, therefore, while we doubt Amazon is going to outright kill Alexa, it seems pretty clear that with them currently losing so much money on it, it seems quite a convenient and sensible area to scale back in.

While no exact figure has yet been confirmed in regard to job cuts, internal staff in charge of Alexa do seem somewhat worried that it might effectively get scaled back to a skeleton crew effectively charged with just keeping the metaphorical lights on.

Will either of these moves affect us consumers though? Probably not in any kind of notably measurable way. Again though, times are hard and it seems that even multi-billion (even trillion) dollar companies are having to make some moves to keep those profits in the black.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!