A Google worker says some staff found out which colleagues had been laid off when their emails bounced back
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- A Google worker says some staffers learned who'd been let go when their emails bounced back.
- Laid-off workers resorted to messaging their ex-coworkers on LinkedIn or texting them with the news.
- Google has been criticized over the abrupt and impersonal nature of January's mass layoffs.
A Google worker says the abrupt nature of the company's mass layoffs last month meant some staffers found out which of their colleagues had been laid off when they tried to send them emails and they bounced back.
Thomas de Rivaz, a software engineer at the tech giant, told Insider that in some cases employees knew their coworkers' jobs were cut "because your email bounced and not for any other reason."
Remaining employees have said Google didn't widely circulate information about who was laid off.
Tim Wilde, a site-reliability engineer who has been at Google for about a decade, told Insider that in some cases he found out employees had been laid off because they posted about it on LinkedIn or Twitter, or because his messages to them on internal channels didn't go through. A West Coast engineer who's been at Google for more than 10 years described similar experiences.
De Rivaz said Google workers had been "figuring out the numbers" of staffers from each office who were laid off. "We've been discouraged from sharing them internally, obviously — that gets shut down quite quickly — but the numbers are there for people to see," he said.
Some of the remaining Google workers asked for anonymity to protect their jobs, but Insider has verified their employment.
Google told US staffers that they were laid off in an early-morning email on January 20. Some saw the email when it came through at around 2 a.m. PT, or 5 a.m. ET, while others realized something was awry when they were locked out of their work laptops and emails. Google cut off their access to company accounts and hardware immediately, though many affected US workers will remain on Google's payroll until March 31.
Wilde said he saw some workers turn up to Google's office in Boston only to have their access badges declined; that's how those workers learned they'd been laid off.
De Rivaz, who works from Google's London office, said that since that day "we've effectively had daily updates from parts of the world of people being laid off."
He added that in countries outside the US, staffers have largely had more notice of their termination and have been able to say goodbye to colleagues.
Some affected US workers told Insider they were annoyed at not being able to say goodbye to or thank colleagues. They said they'd been scrambling to find LinkedIn accounts and cell numbers for their former coworkers, including their managers, to ask for more information about the layoffs and maintain their friendships. Some also expressed frustration about losing access to documents and pictures saved on company devices and in emails.
De Rivaz said he found out about the layoffs when he saw messages in work chats about the internal email from CEO Sundar Pichai. "And so then we read this, obviously, and then it was all anyone talked about for the rest of the day," de Rivaz said.
"It's just been taking a while for everyone to process," he added.
De Rivaz said that in the past when teams were being cut, workers were reallocated to other teams in a process referred to internally as "defragging."
"That attitude has completely disappeared," he said. "Internally it was a massive shock to the system. This really hasn't happened before."
He said that given how long it takes Google to recruit new staffers, the mass layoffs seemed "like a lot of wasted effort."
"We put a lot of deliberation into every hire we make, so having 12,000 of those roles thrown out seemed ridiculous," de Rivaz added.
A technical writer described the layoffs as "super disruptive," especially to projects the laid-off colleagues had been working on.
Wilde said that after seeing high-performing and long-tenured staffers let go, employees lost motivation because they don't know if hard work is enough to protect them from future cuts.
One employee said that remaining staffers cried in work calls on the day of the layoffs.
Were you recently laid off by Google? Or do you still work there? Contact this reporter at gdean@insider.com.