Tech

By Ariel Zilber

February 24, 2023 | 1:14pm

Some Google employees learned that they were out of a job when they tried to send emails from their official work accounts only for those messages to bounce back, according to a software engineer who works at the search engine.

Thomas de Rivaz, who remains employed by the Silicon Valley tech giant in its London office, told Insider that some of his colleagues only learned of their dismissal “because [their] email bounced and not for any other reason.”

The Post has sought comment from Google.

Employees at Google who survived the company’s recent purge of some 12,000 of their now-former colleagues said that management has yet to circulate information as to who was laid off.

Tim Wilde, a site-reliability engineer at Google, told Insider that he found out about terminated employees from posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Wilde also said that he would send internal messages to colleagues that failed to go through — indicating that the target of his messages had been fired.

Wilde, who is based in Boston, said that some workers turned up to the office and tried to sign in with their access badge — only to be turned away. That was when they realized they had been let go, Wilde told Insider.

De Rivaz told Insider that Googlers were “figuring out the numbers” of laid-off staffers on their own.

“We’ve been discouraged from sharing them internally, obviously — that gets shut down quite quickly — but the numbers are there for people to see,” he told Insider.

Since Google announced the firings on Jan. 20, “we’ve effectively had daily updates from parts of the world of people being laid off,” de Rivaz said.

Several former Googlers described the manner in which they learned that they were being let go last month.

A Los Angeles-based lawyer employed by Google discovered he was being laid off by the tech giant in an email that he received at 2 a.m. while he was feeding his newborn infant daughter.

Nicole Tsai, a Southern California-based “vlogger,” posted a viral TikTok video showing the precise moment she learned she was being let go. Tsai is seen in the video shedding tears as she learns of her termination.

Another LA-based engineer, Ali Neil, 29, said she learned of her dismissal after receiving a company notice at 2 a.m. local time while she was on mental health leave.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has been tightening its belt in recent months due to the drop in revenue reported in its most recent earnings call.

The tech giant pulled the plug on high-priced automatons — which separated trash and squeegeed cafeteria tables — created by robotics subsidiary Everyday Robots as part of companywide budget cuts.

Scores of Google employees at the company’s struggling Cloud division were told earlier this week that they needed to share desks and alternate days they come into the office so that they do not overlap with their deskmates, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.