A Google employee on maternity leave said she discovered her job had been axed when she was feeding her newborn daughter in the middle of the night, adding to a series of complaints about the methods the tech giant used to communicate with workers about its recently announced layoffs.
In a LinkedIn post on Saturday, Jana Elfenbein—who had worked at Google as a recruiter for almost five years, according to her profile—said she had recently learned that her position at the company had been eliminated.
“While on maternity leave feeding my three-week-old daughter at 4:30 a.m. Last Friday, I learned that my position at Google had been eliminated,” she said.
Google parent company Alphabet became the latest tech behemoth to announce job cuts on Jan. 20 when CEO Sundar Pichai announced the firm would be laying off around 12,000 people.
“I cannot change what happened, but I can control my response to it,” Elfenbein, who is based in Texas, said of her job loss over the weekend. “So, today, I choose to cherish the meaningful connections and wonderful memories I made, honor the personal and professional growth I gained, and celebrate the legacy of work I leave behind.”
A spokesperson for Alphabet was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Coins2Day.
However, Elfenbein is not the only laid-off Googler to have indirectly found out they’d been laid off in the middle of the night.
In the days following Pichai’s announcement that Alphabet would be carrying out the biggest round of layoffs in its history, a number of workers who had been let go from the company took to social media to air their grievances about how the cuts had been orchestrated.
In a viral LinkedIn post, a former engineering manager who had worked at Google for more than 16 years said he had discovered he had been let go when his account was automatically deactivated in the early hours of the morning.
“This just drives home that work is not your life, and employers—especially big, faceless ones like Google—see you as 100% disposable,” he said.
Another former employee said in a post that she was “devastated” and “angry” at finding out she’d been laid off in the same way, while an ex-Google program manager detailed in a TikTok video that workers had been “blindsided” by the “random” nature of the layoffs.
Pichai defended the layoffs last week, saying they were necessary to prevent the company’s problems from getting “much worse,” and insisting that the “process was far from random.”
In a separate case of bad publicity for Google as an employer, a former executive recently filed a lawsuit in which he claimed he had been fired from the company after rejecting the advances of a high-ranking female colleague.
Google and the female employee strenuously deny the claim.
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