Google Engineer Writes how he Discovered That he was Fired Just Before Interviewing new Applicant

The layoff wave that hit the tech sector a couple of years back shows no signs of slowing down, and after laying off close to 1000 employees working in its Ad sales team in January 2024, Google has once again decided to cut down on its workforce. Google has terminated the roles of developers working in Python, Flutter, and Dart teams effective from the same day. The exact number of the impacted employees is still unknown, but sources suggest that it could easily be 200. Some of the employees terminated have been with Google for almost a decade.

More than 50 engineering roles based out of Google’s California office have been impacted as part of this decision. Some of the employees got the option to relocate to Google offices in India and Mexico. One of the impacted employees Matt Hu shared his bitter experience in a LinkedIn post where he mentioned how he had switched on his office laptop to conduct an interview for a new opening when he realized that he had lost access to all of Google’s office ecosystem, indicating that he was no longer an employee. His wrote, “Went downstairs and opened up my laptop. That was 21:00. I got a weird email saying 'You Cloudtop StopInstance operation has begun' and I suddenly recalled I just had the cloud top maintenance a few days back, it couldn't be a scheduled task, there is definitely something bad happening. I even 'Momaed' (Google's internal search engine) 'what stopinstance means' and I did get the results from the website, so I chose not to believe I was leaving the company.”

As he started reaching out to his teammates, he discovered that more than half of his team had been fired, and this included their manager who had built the team from scratch and had been part of the company for the past 13 years.

Response on social media

Matt shared his experience in 2 posts on LinkedIn that have gone viral with more than 800 reactions on them. Some of the users offered to help Matt with Crystal Galati, Quant Recruiting’s head at Citadel Securities commenting “Message me. I’d love to help”. Justin Butler, a software developer at Amazon, also offered to refer Matt for open roles in Amazon’s engineering team. Some users shared how they had gone through the same experience at some point of time in their careers and asked Matt to maintain a positive outlook and look out for a brighter future ahead.  Stefanie Fackrell, a solopreneur, highlighted that layoffs are part of how business runs by commenting “I know you didn't expect this to happen at Google. But it's business. I've been laid off 3x in my career. I'm here to listen and support. I promise, there is life after Google.”

As Google is entering the restarting phase it has already laid off more than 1000 employees by April alone. Despite the layoffs, the company has managed to achieve the highest growth rate post-pandemic era.