A former Google employee has documented the moment she realised she had been laid off by the IT giant. Nicole Tsai figured out she had been let go when she woke up to an “ominous” text message from her boss and found her access to company properties had been cut off.
Tsai, who rose to TikTok fame documenting her glamorous workplace, was left in tears after finding out she was among the 12,000 Google employees impacted by company-wide layoffs.
“I rushed downstairs to find out that I had lost access to basically everything. I couldn't log into my email or even check my calendar,” she said in a video documenting the day she found out about the layoffs. “I called my boss back and we just sobbed over the phone because she was also finding out about my lay off for the first time today too.”
Tsai said she spent most of the day crying and scrolling through LinkedIn to read about other employees who were also impacted by layoffs. “There were so many people who were in the same boat, that were both equally as shocked and blindsided,” she said.
In the end, she said she felt “so tired from being sad,” that she decided to visit Disneyland -- 'the happiest place on earth' -- to lift her mood. Tsar, who worked out of Google’s Los Angeles office, headed to Disneyland because she wanted to “eat my feelings.”
Her video shows her strolling through Disneyland and ends with her saying she is not sure what she will do next.
Google's parent Alphabet Inc is in the process of laying off 12,000 employees, with CEO Sundar Pichai saying the company “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” Alphabet’s job cuts will affect 6% of its workforce.
Pichai has said that Google will "support" employees as they look for other opportunities.
