Google workers learned they were fired when emails bounced back, staffer says

Some Google employees learned that they were out of a job when they tried to send emails from their official work accounts only for those messages to bounce back, according to a software engineer who works at the search engine.

Employees at Google who survived the company’s recent purge of some 12,000 of their now-former colleagues said management has yet to circulate information as to who was laid off.

Tim Wilde, a site reliability engineer at Google, told Insider that he found out about terminated employees from posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Wilde also said he would send internal messages to colleagues that failed to go through — indicating that the target of his messages had been fired.

Wilde, who is based in Boston, said some workers turned up to the office and tried to sign in with their access badge — only to be turned away. That was when they realized they had been let go, Wilde told Insider.

De Rivaz told Insider that Googlers were “figuring out the numbers” of laid-off staffers on their own.

“We’ve been discouraged from sharing them internally, obviously — that gets shut down quite quickly — but the numbers are there for people to see,” he told Insider.

Since Google announced the firings on Jan. 20, “we’ve effectively had daily updates from parts of the world of people being laid off,” de Rivaz said.

Several former Googlers described the manner in which they learned that they were being let go last month.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been tightening its belt in recent months due to the drop in revenue reported in its most recent earnings call.

Category: Technology

Source: NYPost Technology