As company after company across the world is announcing job cuts, people who have lost their jobs are sharing their stories of how they got to know about their termination and what lies ahead for them. Among the 12,000 employees that Google has laid off is Nicholas Dufau, a new father whose daughter is barely a month old.
Taking to LinkedIn like many of his former colleagues, the Los Angeles-based legal executive narrated how get got to know about his job loss at 2 am, while he was feeding his newborn.
Dufau lost his job as an associate product counsel at Google just three days after he became a father. “On Friday morning at 2am, while feeding my infant, I received a notification that I had lost access to my Google corporate accounts. I had been laid off via automated email,” he wrote.
Dufau, who had spent only six months at the tech giant before being laid off, spoke highly of his team and how they welcomed him into the “Google family”.
“They reassured me that the company was one that treasured its employees and encouraged me to take the full extent of my parental leave to cherish this precious time with my family,” he wrote.
“Every layoff hurts—the timing of this experience, however, not only made me feel acutely expendable, it made me feel naïve.”
Google parent Alphabet cut roughly 12,000 jobs or 6 per cent of its global workforce worldwide amid mass layoffs across major tech companies. This is the largest round of layoffs in the company’s 25-year history.
CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an e-mail communication that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here” and added that the tech giant will "support employees as they look for their next opportunity.
Among those losing their jobs are recruiters, corporate staff and people working on engineering and product teams, Pichai said.
With Alphabet's staff cuts, layoffs at four of the biggest US tech companies total 51,000 jobs in the past few months. They have fanned fears of a recession even as the US job market remains tight.
