Google employee gets locked out of system and discovers he has been laid off, calls it his worst nightmare

Google employee gets locked out of system and discovers he has been laid off, calls it his worst nightmare

Layoffs can be a disturbing experience and it gets much worse when you receive the news out of the blue. Within just a few minutes, your entire world could fall apart when you realise that, the following morning, you won’t have a stable job. When you are an immigrant, the situation is even more tense as you have to also worry about your visa and getting a job before it expires. When tech companies were laying off employees left, right and center last year, many immigrants were affected and were forced to return to their home countries. Several people shared their experiences on LinkedIn, saying that they have limited time to find a new role else they will have to leave the country.Â

Now, a former Google Software Engineer, who lost his job as part of the company’s recent layoffs round, has shared his experience on LinkedIn. He revealed that he had logged in at 9 pm when he noticed that he was being logged out of websites one after another. After that, his system went through a mandatory restart, and he got to know that he had been laid off via email. The ex-Google employee added that this was his “worst nightmare as an immigrant” and it was the longest night of his life.Â

“I went downstairs and opened up my laptop. That was 21:00. I got a weird email saying ‘You 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. Thus I had the longest five minutes in my life, witnessing how I lost corp access one website by another, with a forced laptop reboot, then finally, an email saying Notice regarding your employment,” his LinkedIn post talking about his layoff read.Â

In another post, he mentioned how being laid off was the “worst nightmare” for an immigrant.Â

“As a tech immigrant, layoff is the worst nightmare you can imagine. The 60-day grace period is a curse that prevents you from getting sleep every night. You don’t know how to inform your partner and kids, and your parents thousands of miles away. Sometimes we choose not to let them know at all, to protect them from unnecessary stress and harm,” he wrote.Â

In January 2023, Google made headlines for firing 12,000 employees across the globe. Since then, the company has carried out various layoff rounds, and affected employees have often shared their stories on LinkedIn. Recently, Google was drawing attention for allegedly firing its entire Python team.Â