A Google engineer found out she was fired while she was on vacation when her boss sent her a LinkedIn message.

  • The former Google engineer told Insider that she was fired while on vacation with her family.
  • She learned about the layoff from a LinkedIn message from her manager.
  • The firm cut benefits and increased worker workloads in the months leading up to layoffs, she said.

A Google engineer with five years of experience said she learned about the layoff while on vacation after receiving a LinkedIn message from her manager.

The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear that media exposure could hurt her future career prospects, said she was on vacation with her family and did not check any of her work emails.

Her identity and being fired by Google have been confirmed by Insider.

“I had a few friends who accidentally texted me, but I thought they just wanted to know how my vacation was,” she told Insider in an interview. “It didn’t occur to me that they were checking whether they fired me or not. No one told me it happened, I was just blissfully unaware.”

The engineer said she eventually checked one of her two private emails when she realized her manager had sent her a message on LinkedIn.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ There is no reason why he would try to contact me through LinkedIn,” she said. “Why don’t you email me or send me a chat message? There are so many other ways you can contact me.”

“So I immediately understood. My heart just sank when I saw it.”

According to her, her manager apologized in a message he sent her saying that she had been fired. The manager said he had no other way to contact her, and her termination notice was sent to her second personal email at 5:00 am, which she rarely checks.

Insider reviewed a copy of the termination notice she received.

“It was like a whirlwind of emotions because I just couldn’t connect with anyone,” she said. “Besides, for it to happen not on your terms, and for it to be abrupt, with no closure and no explanation, it was really difficult.”

She added, “I think it’s hard to spend so much time and energy creating something for someone else and making money from your work only to just brush it off and let it go so easily.”

She was one of 12,000 people laid off by Google in a massive effort by the tech giant to cut costs. On January 20, CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an email to employees stating that employees were being laid off around the world in various divisions and functions.

A former employee told Insider that “morale was already very low” prior to being fired due to reduced benefits, as well as increased pressure to perform well, so she didn’t plan on staying at the firm any longer.

However, the way the tech giant handled the layoffs was “terrible.”

“I know it’s hard to fire on this scale, but I’m really sure they could come up with a better way to do it, to at least give people some dignity and some attention,” she said.

She said she heard that a current employee who avoided being fired subsequently quit because he was dissatisfied with the way the company handled the issue.

“People are really really upset about how this happened and I think everyone, even the best performers, are really on edge after this,” she added.

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