Even as technology giant Google continues to cut staff, a laid-off Indian employee stated that the layoffs are not based on performance.
In a LinkedIn post, Animesh Swain, a Google India employee, stated that pink briefs were also served to employees with the highest ratings. The list also includes names that have recently received promotions.
“The people who managed to stay (myself included) are not necessarily better than the ones who got fired,” Swain said in the post.
Another employee from Gurugram, Aakriti Walia, who works as a Google Cloud program manager, was fired just 10 minutes before a meeting.
“The ‘access denied’ message on my system left me numb as I prepared for my meeting just 10 minutes away,” Walia posted on the professional networking platform.
“When I celebrated my 5-year Google birthday a few days ago, I didn’t know it would be my last,” she said.
Earlier, Jennifer Vaden Barth, a creative strategist at Google, said the “layoff affected very talented and highly valued professionals.”
Barth, who had worked at Google for 15 years, said that “laid-offs hit women particularly hard, especially women over 40”.
Meanwhile, in an effort to further reduce costs, Google has even asked employees returning to work to share their desks with a “partner” to maximize office space.
Google India recently laid off more than 400 employees. The layoffs at Google India were part of the wider job cuts affecting 12,000 employees worldwide at the company.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, denied that the layoffs were “arbitrary” and previously said he was “deeply sorry” for the workforce cuts.
In an email to employees, Pichai said he “takes full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”
The layoffs at Google’s parent company were expected amid the deepening funding winter that has hit companies of all sizes amid the global growth slowdown and recession fears.
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