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Dismissals by email, access blocking and lack of compassion: the crude story of former Google employees

The company got rid of 12 thousand workers. How did they find out and how do they navigate the moment?

The wave of layoffs that began Google dropped its first victims. A software engineer described the way he was firing him as a slap”.

Jeremy Joslin, who according to his LinkedIn profile had worked at the tech giant since 2003, said Friday that the tech company warned him of his dismissal by email.

“Hard for me to believe that after 20 years at Google I unexpectedly found out about my last day via email,” he tweeted. “what a slap. I wish I could have said goodbye to everyone face to face.”

“I never thought it would happen like this,” Joslin added in a LinkedIn post.




Former Google employees demanded a lack of compassion at the time of their firings. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier.

Google announced Friday that it was laying off around 12,000 employees, or 6% of its global workforce, affecting employees “across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”

The CEO sundar pichai He said the company had hired too quickly and couldn’t keep all of its staff in the current “economic reality.”

Former Googlers took to LinkedIn and Twitter to post about the abrupt and impersonal nature of their layoffs.

“Getting fired via transactional email without any acknowledgment of your personal time or impact on the company is a tough way out,” Joslin said on LinkedIn. “a little compassion and personal touch can go a long way.

Likewise, the software engineer said in a separate LinkedIn comment on Friday that lost all access to corporate resources that morning and that “no one in my management chain reached out to me.”

“It’s like I’ve fallen out of the net and they have to piece together whatever knowledge I took with me,” he added.

Meanwhile, Dan Russell, a research scientist, posted on LinkedIn: “I found out when I went to work at 4 AM to finish an important analysis, and my badge didn’t work. After 17.5 years at Google, it was a hard way to find out. that I had become a Xoogler“.

Google’s word on layoffs

The tech giant began a restructuring process.  Photo: REUTERS.


The tech giant began a restructuring process. Photo: REUTERS.

The company said the layoff announcement was distributed to staff in the early hours of Sundar Pichai’s announcement and that affected US employees were informed before then, though it did not disclose when.

In this regard, the Bloomberg news agency reported that the layoffs appeared to be structural rather than based on performance. Some workers say that most or even all of their team was laid off.

“There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the decisions made regarding who to let go,” Blair Bolick, a Google recruiter, said on LinkedIn. He added that even her boss didn’t know she was being fired.

In comments, Joslin acknowledged that the company had changed during the two decades she’s spent working there. “It’s not the same company I started at 20 years ago,” he said on LinkedIn.

Another fired engineer said the mass layoffs showed that Google viewed its employees as “100% disposable“.

“I’m devastated. I’m sad, angry,” Bolick said on LinkedIn. “At times I am hopeful, but mostly I am scared and incredibly hurt,” he concluded.

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