Tag Archives: Alphabet

Tech Layoffs Balloon in January As Wall Street Rally Lifts Tech Companies

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The S&P 500 is trading at a record and the Nasdaq is at its highest in two years, CNBC reported. Alphabet shares reached a new pinnacle on Thursday, as did Meta and Microsoft, which ran past $3 trillion in market cap. 

While Wall Street cheers on Silicon Valley, tech companies are downsizing at an accelerating clip So far in January, some 23,670 workers have been laid off from 85 tech companies, according to the website Layoffs.fyi.  That’s the most since March, when almost 38,000 people in the industry were shown the exits.

According to CNBC, activity picked up this week with SAP announcing job changes or layoffs for 8,000 employees and Microsoft cutting 1,900 positions in its gaming division. Additionally, high-valued fintech startup Bret laid off 20% of its staff and eBay slashed 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its full-time workforce. 

Earlier in the month, Google confirmed that it cut several hundred jobs across the company, and Amazon has eliminated hundreds of positions spanning its Prime Video and MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions. Unity, said it’s cutting about 25% of its staff, and Discord, which offers a popular messaging service used by gamers, is shedding 17% of its workforce.

CNBC also reported that the swarm of activity comes ahead of barrage of tech earnings next week, when Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all scheduled to report quarterly results. Investors lauded the cost-cutting measures that companies put in place last year in response to rising inflation, interest rates hikes, recession concerns and a brutal market downturn in 2022. Even with an improving economic outlook, the thriftiness continues.

International Business Times reported that the industry’s pursuit for efficiency and cost-cutting measures is thoroughly connected to tech industry riding into artificial intelligence (AI) wave. 

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said 2023 was the “year of efficiency,” with a stock surge alongside 20,000 job cuts. The increasing demand for AI technologies has led some companies to strategically scale down headcount in non-profitable areas and relocate resources toward AI development.

According to International Business Times, tech execs are strategically crafting their downsizing messages emphasizing the need for focus and efficiency. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer described the layoffs part of a larger “execution plan,” while Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai focused on the importance of making tough decisions for meeting the ambitious goals. Amazon’s Audible CEO, Bob Carrigan, emphasized the necessity of becoming “leaner and more efficient”.

In my opinion, it is never a good idea to suddenly lay off employees with absolutely no warning.  Choosing to do layoffs of real humans, in favor of adding more artificial intelligence to take over their jobs, is a terrible decision. The “robots” should not be allowed to replace the livelihood of humans.

 

Verily Collaborates with California on COVID-19 Risk Screening Survey

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Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet that is focused on life sciences and healthcare, is a sister company to Google. Verily is working in collaboration with the California Governor’s office, federal, state, and local public health authorities to create an online COVID-19 screener survey.

Californians will be able to take an online COVID-19 screener survey through Project Baseline beginning Monday, March 16. People who meet eligibility and requirements for testing will be directed to mobile testing sites based on capacity, where they will complete a nasal swab test. Once tested, individuals will be informed of their COVID-19 test results within a few days.

To be clear, Verily’s COVID-19 Screening Survey is not available outside of California. It also doesn’t cover all of California (at least, not upon launch). Verily says the COVID-19 testing pilot program will start by testing the highest risk individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is a significant volume of cases. Verily explains, “As more testing kits and sites become available, we plan to scale the capacity”.

CNBC reported that in order to qualify for a screening, users are required to log in with their Google account. Users also have to agree to allowing information to be potentially shared with Google. According to CNBC, Verily asks for the user’s name, address, email, phone number and health information – all of which can be shared and used by various government and health authorities, and for “public health purposes”.

It is a good idea to have something that can remotely screen people to determine how likely it is that they have COVID-19. Doing so enhances social distancing, because users can access the screener from home.

However, Verily has some obvious flaws. It is currently only usable in a very limited location. It will exclude users who don’t have a Google account (or who don’t want to have their Google account connected to the Screening Survey). It also collects and shares users’ data, and does not appear to give them an option to disallow that. This could potentially be in violation of California’s CCPA.

If Verily (and Google) really wanted to help with COVID-19, they could create the screening tool without using it to collect and share people’s personal information. To me, it feels like Verily and Google are using this opportunity to get more people to sign up for a Google account, and also to benefit from people’s data. That’s not a nice thing to do, especially to people who are afraid they might have COVID-19.

Alphabet’s Chronicle Launched Backstory

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Chronicle, a new Alphabet company, announced the launch of Backstory. It is a global cloud service where companies can privately upload, store, and analyze their internal security telemetry to detect and investigate potential cyber threats.

Chronicle is focused entirely on enterprise cybersecurity. Their mission is: “Give Good the Advantage”. That mission is fueled by their ability to leverage significant resources to give security professionals an entirely new class of tools, perspectives, and abilities that aim to counter, and even leap ahead of, the capabilities of their antagonists.

Backstory compares your network activity against a continuous stream of threat intelligence signals, curated from a variety of sources, to detect potential threats instantly. It also continuously compares any new piece of information against your company’s historical activity, to notify you of any historical access to known-bad web domains, malware-infected files, and other threats.

In short, Backstory is designed to be used by companies, not individuals. The purpose is to provide companies with data that they probably cannot get on their own so they can use it to detect breaches and to improve their security efforts.

Overall, I think Backstory sounds like a useful thing. In their Medium Post, Chronicle used the DNC hack as an example, and showed how easy it is to miss a data breach. In addition to noticing a breach, Backstory can give a company information about whether or not any of their computers communicated with that web domain.

It seems unlikely that nefarious entities will stop trying to access data and information that they have no right to steal. Hopefully, Backstory can make it harder for hackers to harm people.