A Google software engineer says it was a 'slap in the face' to find out he was laid off via email after 20 years at the company

Google announced Friday it was laying off around 12,000 staff, or 6% of its global workforce.

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• Jeremy Joslin, a 20-year Google engineer, says being laid off via email was a "slap in the face."
• "It's as if I dropped off the grid and they have to piece together any knowledge I took with me," he added.
• Other ex-Googlers have criticized the abrupt and impersonal nature of their terminations.

A software engineer described the way he found out he was being laid off by Google as a "slap in the face."

Jeremy Joslin, who according to his LinkedIn profile had worked at the tech giant since 2003, said on Friday that the company told him over email.

"It's hard for me to believe that after 20 years at Google I unexpectedly find out about my last day via an email," he tweeted. "What a slap in the face. I wish I could have said goodbye to everyone face to face."

"I never thought it would happen like this," Joslin added in a post on LinkedIn.

Google announced Friday it was laying off around 12,000 staff, or 6% of its global workforce, affecting employees "across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions." CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company had hired too quickly and couldn't keep all its staff on in the current "economic reality."

'It's as if I dropped off the grid'

Ex-Googlers have taken to LinkedIn and Twitter to post about the abrupt and impersonal nature of their layoffs.

"Being let go via a transactional email without any acknowledgement of your personal time or impact on the company is a difficult way to go out," Joslin said on LinkedIn. "A little bit of compassion and personal touch can go a long way."

Joslin said in a different LinkedIn comment on Friday that he had lost all access to corporate resources that morning and "nobody in my management chain ever reached out to me."

"It's as if I dropped off the grid and they have to piece together any knowledge I took with me," he added.

Dan Russell, a research scientist, posted on LinkedIn: "I found out when I went to work at 4AM to finish up an important analysis, and my badge didn't work. After 17.5 years at Google, it was kind of a tough way to discover that I'd become a Xoogler."

Elizabeth Hart, a senior marketing manager at Google's Global Ads team who had worked at the company since 2007, posted on LinkedIn, that she found out she had been laid off when she checked her phone on Friday morning while "bleary eyed and still half asleep" and saw a notification saying that her corporate access had expired, alongside a notification for a New York Times article about the layoffs.

Google publicly announced the layoffs at around 5:30 a.m. ET, or 2:30 a.m. PST. The company said that the layoff announcement had been sent to staff earlier that day and that US affected employees had been informed prior to that, though it didn't say when.

Bloomberg reported that the layoffs seemed to be structural rather than based on performance. Some workers say that most or even all of their team was laid off.

"There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the decisions made regarding who to let go," Blair Bolick, a recruiter at Google, said on LinkedIn. She added that even her boss didn't know she was being laid off.

In comments, Joslin acknowledged that the company had changed over the two decades he spent working there. "Not the same company I started at 20 years ago," he said on LinkedIn.

"I'm devastated. I'm sad, angry," Bolick said. "Some moments I'm hopeful, but most of all I'm scared, and so unbelievably hurt."

Were you laid off by Google or another tech company? Contact this reporter at gdean@insider.com.

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