Waymo hit by second round of layoffs, cut 8% of staff this year

When will layoffs at Alphabet end? Layoffs are always tough, but usually you want to do it all in one big blow so that employees know the layoffs are over so they can stop worrying and get back to work. In January, Google had its first big layoff streak when 12,000 jobs were cut, and employees were supposed to be informed of the cuts quickly after the announcement was made. It’s March now and the cuts keep coming. Last week, the Alphabet subsidiary Everyday Robots was closed and all staff were laid off. Waymo is going through a second round of layoffs this week.

Reuters reports that the self-driving car company has laid off another 137 employees, bringing the overall reduction at the Alphabet subsidiary to 8 percent this year, or 209 employees. Waymo stated that the cuts would allow it to “focus on commercial success”, something that Waymo had previously eluded.

Waymo has been around for 14 years but hasn’t had much “commercial success”. It’s the absolute leader in self-driving car technology, and getting to the point where it can be widely adopted will make Waymo an incredible amount of money. It could revolutionize trucking, disrupt Uber and Lyft, which have to pay drivers, and could lead to a ton of licensing technology deals with car manufacturers. However, the road there is long, and there is no end in sight.

Waymo is constantly improving. Earlier this week, the company announced that it had passed the 1 million passenger-only miles mark, which means rides without a driver in the seat. The company is also working on its second self-driving car prototype, an all-electric minivan with no human control. The company has a taxi service, Waymo One, which makes a small profit but is only available in San Francisco and Phoenix. The question of when and how Waymo will scale always raises concerns about cost, security, and availability.

is an unusual company.

Activist investor Christopher Hon of TCI Fund Management, who now seems to be listening to Pichai, sees the 12,000 job cuts as just “a step in the right direction.”Hon wants Google to cut costs by laying off another 25,000 people and paying its employees less. In some of his remarks, Hong also specifically targeted Waymo, stating that “enthusiasm for self-driving cars has collapsed and competitors have pulled out of the market… Waymo has not justified its overinvestment and its losses need to be significantly reduced.”Waymo is the largest part of Google’s “Other Bets”line in its financial statements, which includes all non-Google Alphabet. Alphabet’s research investment is costing the company $6 billion a year (Hon wants that figure halved), but Alphabet can afford it, as it generated almost $60 billion in profits in 2022.