Google Layoffs: Financial plans ruined, laid off despite good work | Ex-employees share heartbreaking stories

Aakriti Walia, a Google Cloud program manager based in Gurgaon posted on LinkedIn that she was laid off just a few days after celebrating her five year Googleversary.

"As I celebrated my 5-year Googleversary just a few days ago, little did I know it would be my last," wrote Walia.

Just like many other employees, Walia was also laid off abruptly. She got to know about it when a message popped up on her computer while she was preparing to join a work meeting.

"The 'access denied' message on my system left me numb as I was preparing for my meeting just 10 mins away. My initial reaction was of denial and then 'why me'," Walia wrote on LinkedIn.

The mother of a six-year old girl said that the hardest part for her is to make her family understand that she doesn’t has a job anymore.

"As I plan the road ahead from here, the next hardest thing for me right now is -- how do I make my six-year-old daughter understand why mumma's not going to work? Well, that will take its own sweet time," Walia wrote.

Apart from being brutal, the ex employees are also calling out Google layoffs to be not based on performance. Google India employee Animesh Swain said in a LinkedIn post that the company’s layoffs were not based on performance.

Employees who received promotions recently and those with highest ratings were also laid off, according to Swain. “The people who managed to stay (including me) are not necessarily better than those laid off,” Swain said.

Earlier many employees had also pointed out that the layoffs have been conducted poorly by Google. Many employees had posted on LinkedIn that they just woke up one morning to work as usual and found that their account has been deactivated, indicating that they have been laid off.

In her LinkedIn post, ex-Google programme manager Katherine Wong, who is eight months pregnant and just one week away from her maternity leave, wrote that when she learned she was one of the 12,000 employees let go by the business, her "heart sank." She also mentioned that the news was more shocking as it came after a positive performance review.

Bonnie Dilber, recruiting leader at Zappier, wrote on LinkedIn that with Google's layoffs she noticed that instead of the "grateful for my time" posts, more employees actually call out how these layoffs were conducted — poorly.

“If you have to go through the difficult decision to conduct layoffs, do right by your people. Give them the courtesy and dignity of a real conversation with a real live human. Let them cry or scream or be mad at you. Answer their questions. Make sure they can access the resources available to them,” she wrote.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, took "full responsibility" for the decisions that resulted in the layoffs.

The company's leadership accepting "full responsibility" for extensive layoffs, on the other hand, is "little consolation," according to Alphabet Workers Union, for the 12,000 employees who are currently without jobs.