Google Layoffs: Employee's post on the experience of getting laid-off goes viral

A LinkedIn post by a Google laid off employee who has described the night of layoff has gone viral. This comes amid media reports of Google sacking its entire Python team for cheaper labour.

In the post Matt Hu describes the night he came to know about his Layoff along with his Manager and other members of the team. Hu who hails from China has been working as a software engineer at Google for the past two years and holds an H-1B visa.

Layoffs Experience

In the post, he said that he sensed a problem as soon as he opened his laptop.

“I went downstairs and opened up my laptop. That was 21:00. I got a weird email saying 'Your Cloudtop StopInstance operation has begun' and I suddenly recalled I just had the cloudtop maintenance a few days back, it couldn't be a scheduled task, there is definitely something bad happening. I even 'Momaed' (Google's internal search engine) 'what stopinstance means' and I did get the results from the website, so I chose not to believe I was leaving the company," said Hu.

He further described that time as the, "longest five minutes in my life".

Hu also lost access to multiple sites and had a “forced laptop reboot". He then received an email saying “Notice regarding your employment". He then learnt that some other members were also laid off.

While drafting a farewell mail for his coworkers, he received another email from his direct manager initimating that he too got laid off.

“While I was drafting a farewell (basically an advertising) email to people under my skip manager, I received another email from my direct manager. He got laid off too, together with the TL at our neighbor team," he wrote in the post.

“As he wrote, 'my hands are shaking as I write this email', my hands were shaking too while reading. He's been at Google for almost 13 years, he founded our team from the first line of code, built everything from scratches, now he had to say goodbye to his baby, with limited corp access except Gmail. I replied to the email instantly, and suddenly the whole team showed up, people were around at night, surprised by this sudden but devastating change. We all know what it means to our team," the former employee added.

Also Watch: Google fires entire Python team for cheap labour: Report