Ex-Google employee recalls how she was fired right after maternity leave

New Delhi,UPDATED: Apr 29, 2024 16:27 IST

Getting to know that you are being given the pink slip from your office job is hard enough. And it becomes tougher when you have just begun a fresh chapter in your life and need stability in terms of finances. All of a sudden, you have nowhere to go to every morning, won't be logging in, won't have the guarantee of receiving a pay cheque every month, and so on. And a former Google employee suffered all of this when she had just been back from her maternity leave. Sharing her story on LinkedIn, the woman wrote that she had been laid off by the company on the first day that she returned from her maternity leave and had been working at the company for nearly 15 years.

The post was written about 5 months back but has resurfaced on social media recently. It has over In the post, the woman shares how she had just stepped into her new home office after feeding her baby to attend a meeting. This is when she got to know that the meeting had been cancelled without any explanation. After that, several of her meetings were cancelled when a "30-minute quick sync" was added to her calendar. This is when she realised that she was going to get fired.

"I knew what was happening. I walked outside where my husband was working in the garden with our girls and said: "Welp, today's the day. They're going to fire me."," the woman wrote in the post.

The woman, who is an entrepreneur presently, said that it had been 15 years that she was working at the company and she was "tired."

"The love affair had ended, and I didn't have the energy to keep playing the game. It must have showed."

She then described how the days leading up to her maternity leave were challenging because of a "toxic team, a miscarriage, a workplace bully, a botched re-org, and a global pandemic." The woman lost her job in 2021, when the Coronavirus pandemic was at its peak.

She added how she was told at the company that she didn't seem as committed to her work and was asked to "speak up less and answer fewer questions."

She concluded her post by writing that as weeks passed, the identities of those affected by the early layoff gradually became clear to her. She described that the underlying reasons behind the layoffs began to align. Each employee who was laid off shared a common trait—to speak up when necessary.

"Over the next few weeks, I started to piece together who the others were who had been impacted by that early layoff. And the "why" started to make sense. Every one of them was smart, passionate, and committed to doing the right thing. No matter what. Every one of them spoke up. It was sad in a way, that Google was losing so much of the goodness that had made it wildly special in those early days. But it was also comforting," she wrote.