Google techie on his boss, half his team getting laid off at night: ‘My hands were shaking’

The Google logo is seen during the Google I/O annual developers conference at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. Google will have to delete a vast trove of search data to settle a suit that it tracked millions of US users who thought they were browsing the internet privately.

A software engineer at Google has described his recent lay off from the internet giant as the “worst nightmare” one can imagine for a tech immigrant. The software engineer, who is originally from China, is in the United States on an H-1B visa.

The man took to LinkedIn to talk about the night he got to know about the loss of his job at Google where he spent the last two years. After cooking a big dinner at home with his girlfriend and watching TV, he went downstairs to prepare for a meeting where he was the interviewer.

When he opened his laptop, he felt that something was not right.

“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,” he wrote on LinkedIn last week.

The man then used Google’s internal search engine to understand what “stop- instance” means”.

I did get the results from the website, so I chose not to believe I was leaving the company,” he said.

He termed the next five minutes as the “longest five minutes” in his 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”.

Until then I started to realize, my watch at Google is over,” he said.

The man then reached out to his colleagues only to know that a few of them too had been laid off. While he was drafting a farewell e-mail, his direct manager sent an e-mail said he too had been asked to leave. The manager, who spent 13 years at Google, said “my hands are shaking as I write this email”.

“My hands were shaking too while reading,” the techie wrote in his LinkedIn post.

I started to text coworkers and I found some other teammates were also impacted. While I was drafting a farewell (basically an advertising) email to people under my skip manager, I received another email from my direct manager.

Realising that half of their team was being eliminated, the entire team got into a huddle late at night to deal with the devastating news.

“One coworker posted a picture taken from our company rooftop — no, from Google’s rooftop, and I almost cried out,” the laid-off Googler said.

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