Google employee laid off in Mumbai: 'I stole something valuable that I can’t be sued for'

The comedian and copywriter is one among the 12,000 employees laid off by the tech giant recently following market uncertainties and recession. (Representative image)

For Priyang Davey, getting laid off by Google was like a breakup. "Sure, it kinda sucks, but you’ll choose your next partner who’s wise enough to not break up with you over a text (or an email)," shared the former creative lead for Google in Mumbai who had worked with the company for about eight months.

Davey, who says he's a copywriter by day and a comedian by night, admitted in a LinkedIn post that before he left the company, he took something with him. "But before leaving Google I stole something valuable that I can’t be sued for -- learnings," he said. "I got to learn digital advertising from the internet’s source code... and form relationships with pretty cool people."

But, Davey also managed to find a silver lining in the dark clouds of mass layoffs in a manner that perhaps only a comedian could. Describing how he felt about getting laid off, he wrote, "It feels weird, since on one hand there’s the grief of losing a job where I got the freedom to do amazing things with tech along with really talented people, and on the other hand - there’s the novelty of my first layoff. It’s like a breakup."

The comedian and copywriter is one among the 12,000 employees laid off by the tech giant recently following market uncertainties and recession, but he is among the few ones optimistic about the future.

One of the hardest things that a former Google employee from Gurgaon has to handle is: "How do I make my six-year-old daughter understand why mumma's not going to work?"

Aakriti Walia, a former Google Cloud program manager, celebrated her five-year Googleversary just a few days ago before 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.