Google my one and only career, says employee laid off after over 16 years of job

A Google software engineer who began as an intern in 2006 and has remained with the company since, was shown the exit door during the company's recent mass layoffs.

Riding on the tide of tech layoffs, Google fired 12,000 employees accounting 6% of its workforce last month in bid to what CEO Sundar Pichai said is to avoid “much worse issues”. This forced employees to go through a stressful period of job hunting. Several laid-off tech workers are now taking to social media to share their harrowing experience.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, US. (Bloomberg)

Joel Leitch, a software engineer at Google who joined as an intern back in 2006 and remained there since was shown exit door in the company's recent mass-layoffs. Sharing his story in a LinkedIn post, Leitch says he has never known any other career and that the company has lost a dedicated employee by firing him.

“For me, it has been a slow process to come to terms with my new reality as Google has been my one and only career, starting as an intern in January 2005 followed by 16.5 years in a full-time capacity,” Leitch wrote. He continues to mention that he is still puzzled as to why Google would let go 'experienced, smart, talented, gritty, high-performing employees'.

Thanking Google for providing the opportunities, Leitch pens tips for the remaining employees. He writes, "Please remember and continue to practice the "3 R(espect)s". He asks employees to focus on what is best for the user while keeping a healthy disregard for the impossibility. He emphasises on innovation and collaboration to create new "magical moments". He says, the group's members and the connections made there will be crucial to Google's future success. “The potential impact that you can have on the world is near infinite,” he adds.

Leading global companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon, Salesforce, Spotify, and others have been downsized their workforce as part of "restructuring" efforts. So far, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have announced 41,000 layoffs, accounting for nearly a third of the jobs added since 2019.