The director of global mental health and well-being at Google has announced that she was among the 12,000 employees recently sacked in the company’s biggest-ever round of layoffs. San Francisco-based Kristin Maczko had been a part of the software giant’s workforce for the last 15 years.
In her LinkedIn post, she informed that multiple people on the mental health and well-being team had been laid off by the big tech firm. To the remaining staff on the team, she added that, “Googlers need you more than ever now, and I am excited to see what you will do,” she wrote.
She recounted her journey with Google, which started in 2008 with the analytics and finance team. Trained in psychology, she was later shifted to her “dream role” in the mental well-being team, which she led from 2021 until her termination last week. She explained that her position gave her the opportunity to apply her “psychology training in an organizational context to improve the wellbeing of Googlers.” Kristin detailed her emotional turmoil over the past few days and added an excerpt from Parker Palmer’s book ‘Let your life speak’ for other coworkers who were fired.
{{/usCountry}}She recounted her journey with Google, which started in 2008 with the analytics and finance team. Trained in psychology, she was later shifted to her “dream role” in the mental well-being team, which she led from 2021 until her termination last week. She explained that her position gave her the opportunity to apply her “psychology training in an organizational context to improve the wellbeing of Googlers.” Kristin detailed her emotional turmoil over the past few days and added an excerpt from Parker Palmer’s book ‘Let your life speak’ for other coworkers who were fired.
{{/usCountry}}Elizabeth Cha, former head of scaled programs in Google’s mental health team, also shared her experience of being sacked after 19 years of service. She said that she had joined the company a year after graduating from college and was grateful for the “once in a lifetime opportunity”.
Another Google employee, who was abruptly let go on January 20, was Los Angeles-based lawyer Nicholas Dufau. The former associate product counsel was feeding his new-born child at 2 am when he received an email from Google telling him he had been laid off. Nicholas Dufau was on paternity leave after the birth of his daughter on January 17 and had joined the company six months back.
Nearly 200,000 IT workers have been laid off since November last year and thousands of Indian IT professionals in the US are now struggling to find new jobs within the stipulated period under their work visas following employment termination to stay in the country.