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Google Is Offering Buyouts to US Employees Throughout the Company

Google Is Offering Buyouts to US Employees Throughout the Company

Yahooa day ago

Google is offering buyouts to U.S. employees across multiple divisions of the company, including within its search division.
The company's knowledge and information division, which includes Google's search, advertising, and commerce teams, announced its "voluntary exit program" today, the company told Investopedia. Buyouts have also been offered to the tech titan's central engineering teams, the company confirmed.
'Earlier this year, some of our teams introduced a voluntary exit program with severance for U.S.-based Googlers, and several more are now offering the program to support our important work ahead,' Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini wrote in a statement.
"A number of teams are also asking remote employees who live near an office to return to a hybrid work schedule in order to bring folks more together in-person," Mencini added.
Google's latest move to reduce headcount comes after multiple rounds of layoffs in 2024, and a major push at the start of 2023 that laid off approximately 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce.
Shares of Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) climbed about 1% Tuesday, leaving them down over 5% for 2025 so far. They were little changed in after-hours trading.
Read the original article on Investopedia

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AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers
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AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers

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Now, however, a recent omission from Google has rekindled fears that the company might stop sharing source code for new Android releases, though Google has stated these concerns are unfounded. As promised, Google published the source code for Android 16 this week, allowing independent developers to compile their own builds of the new operating system. This source code was uploaded to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), as usual, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. However, multiple developers quickly noticed a glaring omission from the Android 16 source code release: the device trees for Pixel devices were missing. Google also failed to upload new driver binaries for each Pixel device and released the kernel source code with a squashed commit history. Since Google has shared the device trees, driver binaries, and full kernel source code commit history for years, its omission in this week's release was concerning. These omissions led some to speculate this week that Google was taking the first step in a plan to discontinue AOSP. In response, Google's VP and GM of Android Platform, Seang Chau, refuted these claims. In a post on X, he addressed the speculation, stating that 'AOSP is NOT going away.' Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority He also confirmed the omission of Pixel device trees is intentional, stating that 'AOSP needs a reference target that is flexible, configurable, and affordable — independent of any particular hardware, including those from Google.' Instead of supporting AOSP builds on Pixel devices, Google will support the virtual Android device 'Cuttlefish' as its reference target. Cuttlefish runs on PCs, allowing Google and platform developers to test new hardware features. Google will also continue to support GSI targets, which are generic system images that can be installed on nearly any Android device. On one hand, this logic is sound. 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Oman foreign minister says there will be sixth round of negotiations between Iran and US on Sunday
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Claude 4 is one of the best chatbots yet — here's the only prompt you'll ever need for it
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