Search engine giant Google has laid off around 12,000 employees, with chief executive Sundar Pichai terming the job cuts as a much-needed move to avoid ‘much worse issues’.
Since then, social media has been flooded with laid off employees narrating their ordeal on being fired by the technological giant.
Among the laid off employees is Nicole Tsai, who filmed a YouTube video to narrate what transpired on that ill-fated day she was fired. In a 91-second video, Tsai recalls a text she received from her boss asking her to check her email. To her horror, she found that the official email was no longer accessible to her.
Wiping her tears, Tsai said she called up her boss after being unable to access the office properties like the email and calendar. Both of them cried over phone because the boss had come to know about Tsai’s layoff for the first time then.
Tsai, a programme manager at Google before she was fired, scrolled through her messages from peers who were also fired by the company. Comparing the layoff to Russian Roulette, a lethal game of chance in which a player places a single bullet in a revolver, spins the cylinder and places the muzzle against the head or body of the opponent or himself. On pulling the trigger, if the loaded chamber aligns with the revolver, the weapon will fire and kill or injure the player.
Tsai recalls scrolling through Linkedin and reading posts by peers and other employees who had been fired. “There were many people on the same boat, equally shocked and blindsided. Towards the end, she decided to go to Disneyland to get better.
