Google announced on Friday that it is laying off 12,000 employees which is makes up about 6% of their staff.
After spending two decades at Google as a software engineer, Jeremy Joslin was abruptly laid off with thousands of other colleagues last week. According to Joslin, the manner in which Google delivered the news was “cold” and heartless.
In response to the potential recession that may occur this year, Google released around 12,000 employees, making up for about 6% of parent-company Alphabet’s overall workforce. Though the firm had employed thousands more during the pandemic, former employees expressed dismay with the company’s method of announcing the layoffs.
Despite understanding the complexity of dismissing thousands of workers in one go, Joslin and other former Google employees were aggrieved by the way they received the notice of their dismissal: via an email to their personal address, with no advance warning. They were further incensed by the impersonal nature of this communication.
“Being notified by email is definitely not optimal,” Mike Coleman, who worked remotely for Google from Oregon, told CBS MoneyWatch. But, he added, “In the end, I don’t think I would have learned anything additional from an in-person notification. Doing it over email allowed me to have my reaction in private versus in front of someone who likely had nothing to do with the decision.”
