Ex Google employee, laid off during mental health leave, calls it 'devastating'

Google parent company Alphabet has laid off around 6 per cent of its global workforce.

A former Google employee, on a mental health break, was laid off during her leave. While Ali Neil said that at least her leave positioned her to be somewhat prepared for an event like this, it took her a few days to finally come to terms with what happened.

“After having some time to really settle with everything that’s happened over the past week, I thought I’d add some color to my exhausted post I shared early last Friday after not being able to sleep. It wasn’t all that great still being awake at 2:06AM to read that email,” Neil wrote in a fresh LinkedIn post.

She continued: “For some time, I have somewhat held Google as that pinnacle Organization. The one I wanted to aspire to work for, then was, and hadn't really considered what comes after Google, and until last week I thought I’d have that time whenever it felt right to make that next step.”

She added that her losing the job was “devastating” and having to think about what is next after Google is “somewhat-comfortably unsettling”.

“I absolutely miss my team and the myriad of colors in the company culture that is Google, the experience of it all, and being Googley. But it’s also such a good reminder in my life that, it’s still an Enterprise Multinational Company. An Entity, not an Identity, and that means there’s so much more to explore and continue to give 110% toward. I feel so very proud to have gotten where I am today, and to see what’s next,” she wrote.

She thanked her teammates and manager for her time at the search engine giant while concluding her post. Read her full post here.

Neil was a Customer Engineer, infrastructure modernization and healthcare, for over 2 and half years at Google.

Google parent company Alphabet laid off around 6 per cent of its global workforce last month in a shock move as it followed other tech giants such as Meta, Amazon and Microsoft in mass layoffs.