Source: New Wisdom
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It's only been over ten days since 2024, and a wave of layoffs has hit Silicon Valley. Google plans to lay off over 1,000 people, and 27 companies have announced layoffs one after another. In a year of explosive growth for large models, is AI really going to replace coders?
Over the past year, the rapid development of AI large models has made everyone look forward to a bright future.
Unexpectedly, the start of 2024 brought a wave of layoffs in Silicon Valley!
The tech giant Google is at the forefront, laying off over 1,000 people, including personnel from core engineering, Google Assistant, and hardware teams such as Pixel phones.
As of September 30, 2023, Google had 182,000 employees. This layoff is the largest since the 12,000 layoffs at the beginning of 2023.
On the same day, Meta's Instagram team laid off 60 technical project managers, Discord laid off 17% of its staff, a total of 170 people, and Pixar is rumored to lay off about 20% of its staff, approximately 300 people. Even the newly established startup Humane laid off 10 people.
According to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoff data, 27 companies have announced layoffs this year, totaling over 4,500 people.
Looking at the situation in the past two years, it seems that starting the year with large-scale layoffs has almost become a tradition in Silicon Valley.
Just last year, right after the new year, leading tech companies "graduated" a large number of Silicon Valley programmers.
Last year, Google laid off 12,000 people at the beginning of the year. Compared to last year, this year's numbers actually indicate a much-improved situation.
Compared to Google's reduction of staff in departments that have not been performing well for years, it is the smaller companies like Pixar and Discord that, due to the impact of new technologies on industry development or overall cost control, can better illustrate that the entire tech industry is still in a downturn.
"Graduation" of a thousand people, Google executives are also among them
Since the birth of ChatGPT, Google has been constantly catching up.
A series of releases such as Bard, PaLM2, Gemini multimodal models, etc., are all aimed at closing the gap with Microsoft and OpenAI, and this is destined to be a protracted battle.
While focusing on AI research and reducing expenses, the tech giant Google also joined the wave of layoffs in 2024 on Wednesday.
Three sources familiar with the matter stated that Google laid off employees from the core engineering department, Google Assistant—voice-operated virtual assistant, and the hardware department responsible for manufacturing Pixel phones, Fitbit watches, and Nest thermostats.
Most of the layoffs in the hardware department affected a team dedicated to researching augmented reality (AR) technology.
Specifically, this round of layoffs includes not only regular employees but also executives.
According to documents submitted by Google to the state of California, "630 employees were laid off in the state this week, including 4 vice presidents and 25 directors. It is said that employees at these levels usually have annual salaries in the millions of dollars."
A spokesperson for Fitbit confirmed that as part of the restructuring, Fitbit's co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman will also leave Google.
In 2019, Google made a $2.1 billion acquisition offer to this smartwatch company.
After completing the final acquisition of Fitbit in January 2021, James Park continued to serve as Vice President and General Manager of Fitbit. Subsequently, he released the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 for Google, with the last appearance being in October of last year.
According to a current employee and a former employee, this year's layoffs were communicated by vice presidents and lower-level leaders in human resources, among others.
A Google spokesperson stated in a release:
We are responsibly investing in the company's top priorities and future significant opportunities. Following the layoffs in the second half of 2023, some teams are continuing this organizational change, including reductions in positions globally.
Specific number of layoffs revealed
How many employees were laid off by Google in different regions?
An article from a foreign media outlet directly dug out the internal list of employees laid off by Google, detailing positions, departments, and more.
A total of 702 employees in Mountain View, San Francisco, and Sunnyvale were affected, including many employees in the UI design department.
The following is a list of employees laid off in the San Francisco Bay Area, as per the documents submitted to the state government:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24358224/google-layoffs-011124.pdf
Mountain View (layoff period from March 10 to October 29)
Charleston Road 1900, 1945, 1950, 1965, and 2000: 56 employees were affected, including a senior product operations personnel, user experience managers and designers, product managers, and software engineers.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway: 177 employees were affected, including software engineering directors and product managers, as well as dozens of software engineers and product managers.
1200, 1300, 1400, and 1500 Crittenden Lane: 63 employees were affected, including software engineers, user experience researchers and managers.
2019, 2027, 2029, 2051, 2061 Stierlin Court: 68 employees were affected, including a technical project management director, hardware engineering managers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and technical project managers.
325 Gladys Ave.: 72 employees, all childcare workers or center teachers, will be laid off starting from August 9 as the company "ceases operations" of the childcare center.
San Francisco (layoff period from March 10 to May 26)
55 Spear St.: 42 employees were affected, including user experience managers, designers, and engineers.
345 Spear St.: 26 employees were affected, including 2 product management directors, 1 software engineering director, 1 software specialization director, and 1 vice president of sales.
215 Fremont St.: 23 employees were affected, including 1 hardware director, user experience director, and 1 engineering vice president.
One Market St.: 14 employees were affected, including 1 product analysis director and technical writers.
Sunnyvale (layoffs starting from March 10)
1225, 1260, and 154 Crossman Ave.: 102 employees were affected, including infrastructure and data center operations directors, as well as product management and software engineering.
225, 227, and 242 Humboldt Court: 69 employees were affected, with the majority being software engineers.
It is evident that these layoff lists are currently only for employees in California.
On the "一亩三分地" forum, a netizen expressed being laid off as a member of the Google Assistant team.
For compensation for the layoffs, an anonymous user explained:
To be precise, it's not called layoffs, but "position elimination," giving everyone 60 days to transfer to another team. In reality, it's equivalent to layoffs.
Google's "position elimination" standard for layoffs can reduce compensation expenses. This standard is also worse than layoffs, giving two months' salary first, and if a new team is not found, providing 14+n weeks, without accelerated vesting.
Closure of Kindergarten, Reduction of Employee Benefits
This round of layoffs also led to Google closing a kindergarten with 300 spots specifically for employees, resulting in the dismissal of 73 employees and the elimination of a very important benefit for many employees.
The kindergarten is expected to close in August this year. Losing daycare services may have a significant impact on the company's working parents and their recruitment efforts, especially since Google also cut some other office benefits last year—free hardware product replacements and free office snacks.
At Google, CEO Pichai has been pushing the company to reduce expenses in the face of a deteriorating global economy since July 2022.
In January 2023, Google laid off 6% of its employees, or 12,000 people, in the largest layoff the company has ever conducted. Before the layoffs, Google had a total of 190,700 employees and tens of thousands of contractors globally.
Since then, the company's executives have been saying that they will make significant cost reductions to focus on generative AI.
As of September 30, Google had 182,000 employees. Google stated that Wednesday's layoffs were part of a series of reorganizations as part of normal business processes.
However, the Alphabet Workers Union, representing over 1,400 Alphabet employees, called the layoffs "unnecessary."
Our team members work hard every day to create excellent products for our users, and the company cannot continue to lay off our colleagues while making billions of dollars in profit every quarter.
Some Google employees already see January as the "new tradition" for annual large-scale layoffs.
According to Google, more layoffs are expected throughout January as decisions are made at the department level.
Meta Lays Off 60 Ins Technical Project Managers
According to the anonymous disclosure website Blind, Meta has laid off all technical program managers at Instagram, affecting around 60 people, while regular product managers were not affected.
Similar to Google, the number of layoffs this time is almost negligible compared to last year.
Meta experienced two waves of epic layoffs at the end of the previous year and the beginning of last year, laying off nearly 21,000 employees, and Zuckerberg had to personally apologize to the laid-off employees in a video.
This round of layoffs, according to members of the disclosure website, seems to be due to the impact of technology rendering some roles in the team meaningless, leading to the layoffs.
However, netizens also believe that a person's ability to contribute in the workplace is related to their position, but human factors are also important.
Pixar Layoffs: Rumored Overall Reduction of 20%
According to company insiders, Pixar's layoffs could reach up to 20%, reducing the team of 1,300 people to less than 1,000 in the coming months.
And according to internal sources, many of the Pixar employees who were laid off as a subsidiary of Disney actually belonged to Disney's streaming media department, as part of Disney's cost-cutting and profit-turning plan for its streaming media.
At the same time, because Pixar will reduce the number of productions this year, it has also led to a decrease in labor demand.
It is worth noting that at the end of last year, Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of another animation company, DreamWorks, publicly stated that due to the development of AI technology, the cost of the animation industry will decrease by 90% in the next 3 years.
The prophecy came true, as Pixar has now experienced a wave of 20% layoffs after the Chinese New Year. It seems that layoffs in the animation production industry will continue in the near future.
Other Companies Join the Layoff Wave
In addition to the Silicon Valley companies mentioned above, a large number of companies will join this wave of layoffs at the beginning of 2024.
Three months ago, Humane, a startup that released its first AI hardware AI Pin, raised $200 million from Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman.
Today, AI Pin has not yet been officially shipped, and the company, founded by former Apple executives, announced a 4% layoff, affecting 10 people.
One insider said that the leadership recently informed employees that this year's budget will be reduced.
Although the company stated that this is part of a broader restructuring, such layoffs do not completely give employees confidence, especially considering the confusion and questioning that the company's main product faced after its launch last year.
Yesterday, Amazon was laying off hundreds of employees from its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. This is a new round of targeted layoffs since Amazon began large-scale layoffs in November 2022.
In addition, the social software Discord also announced a 17% layoff, affecting 170 people in different departments.
According to the information conveyed to employees by CEO Jason Citron, Discord is not in serious financial trouble, even though it has not yet turned a profit.
Discord has raised about $1 billion in total. Since rejecting Microsoft's $12 billion acquisition offer in 2021, the company has been considering going public.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the company has over $700 million in cash on its balance sheet and aims to turn a profit this year.
Tech Industry Labor Demand Reduction, and How Much Does It Have to Do with AI?
We have reported that a recent survey of programmers organized by Blind and Motherboard showed that 90% of programmers believe that it has become more difficult to find a job now.
The main factor is the rapid advancement of AI in coding capabilities, which has led to a significant decrease in the demand for junior programmers by tech companies.
Combined with the downturn in the economic cycle, the saturation of programmers, who have always been in short supply, has emerged.
Matt Welsh, a former Harvard University computer science professor and now an entrepreneur, revealed to the magazine that due to AI's ability to largely perform software engineering work, this may lead to a decrease in job security and salary levels for most people in the software industry, except for the most talented individuals.
However, the CEO of the AI coding platform Replit stated that the changes brought about by AI may not necessarily be a bad thing for programmers; it may just change the specific nature of their work, but the world still needs programmers.
He stated, "Perhaps not in the near future—the word 'coding' will disappear from the dictionary, because programming will no longer require code, but will be the pure act of solving problems with computers, enabling more and more people to use computers. Replit has only touched the tip of this new technology. I think ChatGPT has taken it to another level. We are now at the beginning of another significant leap in developer productivity. I think productivity will increase by 10 to 100 times. There are still not enough programmers in the world, and they are very expensive. The higher our programming efficiency, the more software we can create. AI assistants can help you debug code, improve code, and refactor code, which will make all aspects of the software development lifecycle better in terms of accessibility. You will see product and front-end engineers able to do much of the work that back-end or full-stack engineers might have done in the past. I think this will put pressure on both sides, which may affect the employment of software engineers; they must specialize. Otherwise, they will either have to build products or become low-level platform engineers."
He stated that having coding knowledge is still a valuable skill, as AI will help speed up the programming process and break down some barriers to entering computer science and the industry.
As AI becomes integrated into coding, the value of software engineers will be more reflected in their ability to build new things and supervise and manage code, rather than just writing code.
Despite various measures such as layoffs, there are still many vacant software positions in the world. Silicon Valley has been "hoarding" talented employees.
However, in any case, coding work may soon undergo earth-shaking changes, just as C++ coding is completely different from assembly language coding.
When computers start to communicate with humans in return, this will have a huge impact on those who make a living from coding.
Reference:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/google-cuts-hundreds-of-jobs-in-its-voice-assistance-hardware-teams-as-fitbit-founders-leave/?guccounter=1
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