"As I celebrated my five-year Googleversary just a few days ago, little did I know it would be my last," shares Aakriti Walia a Google Cloud program manager based in Gurgaon. She is one of the 12,000 employees laid off by the tech giant recently.
She got to know that she had lost her job when a message popped up on her computer while she was preparing for a meeting. "The 'access denied' message on my system left me numb as I was preparing for my meeting just 10 mins away. My initial reaction was of denial, then 'why me'," Walia wrote on LinkedIn.
She noted that although it's been a few days since the layoff, she's begun to accept the decision and move on, but until she finds another job, the impact that it has had on her family has been difficult.
"As I plan the road ahead from here, the next hardest thing for me right now is -- how do I make my six-year-old daughter understand why mumma's not going to work? Well, that will take its own sweet time," Walia wrote.
Walia is one among the thousands of Google employees reeling from a mass layoff and the manner in which it was executed. Another former employee of Google in India was laid off while she was on a work-related video call. The staffer had worked with the tech giant throughout her entire career spanning 15 years and had even met her husband at Google. The manner in which she was laid off, however, left her in a state of denial.
Deepti Krishnan, who handled HR operations management at Google, said she kept refreshing the page hoping that the call was disconnected due to an internet problem.
"Having spent (almost) half my life here, Google is the only employer I’ve ever known (such is the loyalty that even my internship was here," Krishnan wrote on LinkedIn.
"When I was abruptly disconnected from my video call only to realise I was staring at an ‘access denied’ page, I was in denial. I kept refreshing the page hoping it was my internet that was acting up. When the page refreshed I was now looking at an email informing me that my time here was up. An image that’ll likely stay with me for a long long time," she shared on LinkedIn.
Read more: Google declares 'significant cuts' in bonuses of all senior VPs. What Sundar Pichai said
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