Several big-name tech companies in Singapore and overseas, including Twitter, Meta, Shopee and Carousell, have unfortunately been laying off their staff recently.
It turns out that despite its ubiquity, Google hasn’t been spared, either.
The carnage has now reached the company’s office in Singapore, with about 190 staff losing their jobs.
Source: Tom Caillet on LinkedIn
However, the company has been unable to share the exact details of its layoffs in Singapore, leaving current and former employees to put the pieces together.
In a LinkedIn post on Friday (17 Feb), Mr Christopher Fong, founder of Xoogler – a community for former Google staff – revealed a piece of sad news.
Some 190 Google staff in Singapore, as well as about 450 in India, received news that the company had let them go that day, he said.
Source: Christopher Fong on LinkedIn
Staff who were retrenched were from various departments like Google Cloud, Google Pay, recruiting, sales, finance and legal, Mr Fong told Channel NewsAsia (CNA).
Xoogler will be helping these former Googlers make the transition, starting with a gathering on Friday. About 50 former Google staff in Singapore had already registered for it.
They are also offering free peer support programmes for those whom the layoffs had affected.
Several of those former Google Singapore staff have posted on LinkedIn about how they felt about the sudden turn of events.
A former technical recruiter said she received the bad news when she was watching TV with her husband, in “one of the heaviest emails” she’d ever read.
Source: LinkedIn
Another said his retrenchment came as a surprise as he had just received a promotion a few months ago.
Source: LinkedIn
A former deal strategist admitted that it was “difficult” to read the email about her retrenchment. She also “struggled to comprehend” why it had happened.
After all, she had just joined Google six months ago from Microsoft, she said.
Source: LinkedIn
She had even received a bonus indicating, in her opinion, that she had been performing well.
While they all praised their colleagues and their experiences at Google, they understandably seemed shell-shocked and still searching for answers.
Google themselves were unable to provide clarity on the job cuts in Singapore.
Upon enquiries from CNA, a Google spokesperson said they were “unable to share” how many Singapore employees had been retrenched.
Source: Google
They could only confirm that their layoffs were part of the workforce reductions announced last month by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
In a blog post on 20 Jan, Google and Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said the company would be cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide.
While staff in the United States (US) would be notified first, the process would take longer in other countries.
He said he was “deeply sorry” for the cuts, and took “full responsibility” for the decisions that led to them, explaining that,
Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.
Following this announcement, a Google employee in California found out that she’d been laid off when she lost access to her work accounts.
She called her boss, whom she found out had just discovered about the retrenchment that same day.
She proceeded to visit Disneyland to cheer herself up.
Just half a year ago in August 2022, Google said in a blog post that they were reaffirming their commitment to Singapore’s future for their 15th anniversary.
Source: Google
They also revealed that they had more than 3,000 employees in their Singapore office, which is also their Asia-Pacific headquarters.
That means the layoffs on 17 Feb represented about 6.3% of their local workforce.
Hopefully, the affected employees will be able to get back on their feet soon.
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Featured image adapted from Tom Caillet on LinkedIn.
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