Logged out at 11 pm, received termination mail at 2 am, employee shares Google layoff experience

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Vishal Arora shared his layoff story on Google where he told that he was among one the 12,000 employees who were laid off by Google. He said the process of the layoff was more shocking than the news itself.

“Most of all, I’m surprised at how unexpected this was. And every unexpected outage deserves a blameless post-mortem, so here is mine, along with my lessons learned: https://lnkd.in/gjB7Yscc,” said Vishal Arora in his Linkedin post.

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In the document link he shared with his post, he mentioned how things started with a mail, which he thought was spam, and ended the next morning when he was not able to login into his laptop.

Receives an email at 2:00 am about his layoff

Months ago, Vishal Arora received an email from ‘Direct report in India’ about the message being the last chat message. He received the mail at 2:00 am on 20 January. Vishal thought it to be a spam email. The next morning, when he tried logging in at the computer for his meeting at 7:00 am, he was denied access by the system. That was the time when he realised that he was laid off by the company.

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Expected smoother outage with better communication

The process of laying off a large number of employees “could have been smoother through better communication and transparency.” He also mentioned how other organisations have terminated employees with an in-person notification, along with a limited opportunity to bid farewell to close colleagues. He also pointed out creative options used by other companies to avoid layoffs like “temporary employee pay cuts, or temporary reductions in benefits.”

Lessons learned from layoff

-Vishal Arora also shared some of the things he will take care of in his next job. He said how his wife turned down the opportunity to join Google some time ago. The decision has helped the couple in diversifying their income. Vishal also mentioned how his stock portfolio was highly skewed with Google stock. He also mentioned the importance of building a financial cushion for such situations as there is no guarantee of severance packages. Employees should also work on enhancing their skills and not being limited to their job, as they can be taken from them anytime. It is important to equally prioritise family, personal health, friends, etc.