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The American multinational recorded 250 billion US dollars of revenue in 2021.
In 2022, Alphabet, the parent company of the tech giant, reported having 156,000 employees.
The employees of the company are called “googlers”, newcomers are nicknamed “nooglers”.
In recent weeks, many companies around the world have presented various layoffs in their workforces, due to the strong economic crisis that is being experienced globally. One of these companies has been Google, which has laid off more than 12,000 employees and many were unaware of its future, a former employee of the technology company told it in a video on TikTok.
As global companies struggle to stay afloat and cut costs, layoffs are seen as the most direct way to do it. On January 20, in a statement, Google confirmed the layoffs that will affect its workers around the world.
Let’s remember that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, according to its 2021 report, employed more than 156 thousand people, which represents an increase of more than 21 thousand workers compared to 2020.
In this sense, the layoffs are added to the more than 60,000 carried out by technology companies in recent months, including 11,000 on Meta Platforms, nearly 4,000 on Twitter, and over 10,000 on Amazon.
The history
Through a video on TikTok, a former Google employee shared what a “day in the life of a fired employee” is like.
The recording that has gone viral captures the anguish after discovering that he was one of the 12,000 workers fired by the tech giant earlier this week.
The woman, who is identified as Nicole Tsai, breaks down in tears in the video as she narrates. “A day in my life I got fired at Google.”
“So I woke up to this really ominous message from my boss and I honestly had no idea what it was about so I called her the minute I woke up and saw this,” Tsai says in the 90-second clip that It has been viewed more than 4.6 million times.
In the recording, the young woman, who lives in California, posted a screenshot of the text message she received from her boss, which read: “Hi Nicole, feel free to call me.”
@nicolesdailyvlog The Google playoffs were not how I expected to start off 2023, but I know it’s only up from here 🥲 #techlayoffs #googlelayoffs #techgirl #corporatelife #techvlog #dayinmylife #techlayoffs2023 ♬ Flowers – Miley Cyrus
Tsai says in the clip that her boss told her that “Check the news and your email.” When Tsai tried to log into her business email, she received a message saying, “You don’t have access.”
“I called my boss and we cried on the phone because he was also finding out about my dismissal for the first time today,” he says.
Later in the video he also shows screenshots of text messages Tsai sent and received to people on her team and others within the company who were also told they were out of work.
The former Google employee echoes a similar complaint made by laid-off employees who have been quoted in media reports as saying that the decision on who to fire “It was not based on performance.”
“I went on LinkedIn and noticed that there were others in the same boat, who were also fired. The experience of logging into LinkedIn and reading about other people being fired was not good for my mental health,” she says.
In the same context, this panorama was confirmed during a tense meeting of all, at the beginning of this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was bombarded with questions from anxious employees who feared more layoffs were on the way.
Pichai denied the layoffs were random and urged his employees to stay focused on their jobs as the company navigates difficult economic terrain that has forced other tech giants to lay off workers.
Pichai acknowledged that “I was also very saddened by the loss of some really good colleagues across the company.”
A case similar to this documentation of the former Google employee, was lived, when Elon Musk took the leadership of Twitter, and laid off a large portion of the workforce, with workers flocking to social media to recount their experience at the time.
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