Google told affected US staff in an early-morning email on January 20 that "we no longer have a job for you." Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
Story by gdean@insider.com (Grace Dean) •
One security engineer, who found out he was laid off after he got a notification on his work phone overnight and realized he couldn't unlock his company devices, told Insider that being let go in this way was a "shock."
"That wasn't the culture that we worked in, at least before that point," he said. "How Google behaved was not Google."
Many laid-off workers spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns speaking to the press could violate their severance package or because they may want to return to Google in the future, but their identities are known to Insider.
Google is known for its rigorous interview process and its workers are frequently targeted by headhunters, but many choose to stay on because of the open culture, benefits — like on-site laundry and gyms — and job security.
Paul Baker, a video production manager, told Insider that he "100% embraced Google culture" and would sometimes spend the whole day on campus. "I drank the Kool-Aid," he said.
"Google felt like my home," a member of Google's analytics team who'd been there for around a decade told Insider. "It was a family ... You could feel it when you walked through the door."
He said he felt "taken advantage of." The decision to lay staff off over email was "inhuman" and showed that Google was "just a company," he said.
One laid-off technical program manager said she'd turned down other job offers and moved cross-country when she started her job less than a year ago. Reading the email, she "broke down in tears," she said.
Other laid-off workers told Insider the email layoffs "came off as lazy," showed "cowardice," and "really stunk."
"The mechanics of it all are very unpleasant," one said.
Related video: Google employees stage protests over job cut, labour conditions (The Times of India)
Baker told Insider he was laid off while on paid carers' leave. A friend messaged him about the layoffs, and Baker realized he was affected when he couldn't log into his laptop.
"This is kind of unprecedented because Google's never acted like this before," he said. "We're basically cut off and I'm still in a scramble trying to figure out: How does my severance work while I'm on carer's leave?"
Other workers were laid off while on maternity leave.
Baker said he wasn't resentful about the impersonal nature of the layoffs, "just extremely disappointed."
Nicholas Whitaker, who worked in Google's people development team before being laid off, told Insider that when he saw messages from colleagues that morning asking if he was okay, he thought there'd been a shooting or a natural disaster.
His initial reaction was "complete shock and dismay," he said, describing the lack of personal outreach as a "slap in the face."
"The thing that stings the most is just the lack of respect and the lack of humanity in the way that it was approached."
Laid-off workers said in many cases their managers reached out on other channels to offer support and express surprise at the layoffs after affected employees were swiftly cut off from corporate communication channels. Many managers appear to not have been told in advance about the layoffs or asked to help select employees. Two of the laid-off workers Insider spoke to said their managers had also been let go.
Time zones created further problems. While many workers in the US woke up to their termination email or got it before they were due to start work, this wasn't the case for employees in Europe. Dan Lanigan-Ryan, a recruiter based in Ireland, told Insider that he gradually got locked out of company accounts, which other workers put down to tech problems, culminating in a call with a job candidate dropping.
"I was blocked out of everything. And then I saw on the news about 15, 20 minutes later that Google was announcing 12,000 layoffs," he said.
Google publicly announced the layoffs at around 2:30 a.m. PT, 5:30 a.m. ET, and 10:30 a.m. GMT.
Lanigan-Ryan said that because he was a contractor, he didn't get a termination email from Google, instead just getting a message a few hours later from his agency.
The 10-year analytics employee said that some US staff hadn't received the email, because Google had the wrong email address on file.
Two decade-long employees who weren't affected by the layoffs told Insider that staff were now uncertain about their jobs and feared further workforce reductions.
"Anything that used to feel special or like you really were a part of a mission — not just a big money-making machine — that feeling is I think gone," an engineer on the West Coast said. An East Coast engineer questioned what distinguished Google from other companies for remaining staff being headhunted now that their sense of job security was gone.
"To preserve the culture of the company, I would've liked to see layoffs done in a more concerted and thoughtful way," one laid-off worker, who'd been at Alphabet's treasury for around five years, said.
"I just can't understand why Google would've selected to squander the trust that employees have in the company by doing it this way."
A technical writer at Google who wasn't laid-off told Insider remaining staff feel "expendable" and were having trouble focusing. She called the layoffs a "massive betrayal of trust."
"It feels very much like they are just as cutthroat corporate as anybody else," a laid-off employee who'd been at Google Cloud for close to five years said.
"The crown has fallen here."
Were you laid off by Google? Or do you still work there? Contact this reporter at gdean@insider.com.
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