A Google engineer said taking her kids to school just after finding out she'd been laid off was like being 'in a fog' in a heartfelt Medium post

• An engineering director at Google found out she was laid off as she prepared to take her kids to school.
• Sivan Hermon felt like she was "one kid's tantrum away from losing it," she wrote in a Medium Post.
• The thought of no longer being at Google after nine years was "too painful," she added.

An engineering director at Google said she took her kids to school right after finding out she was one of the 12,000 people who had been laid off by the tech giant in an emotive post on Medium.

Sivan Hermon, a director of engineering at Google for just over nine years, woke up to her alarm at 7:10 a.m. on January 20 when she came across an email from CEO Sundar Pichai explaining that the company was making mass layoffs, she wrote in a Medium post.

She then discovered another email titled "Notice Regarding Your Employment."

"My heart sank as I read the words, 'We are reducing our workforce and are very sorry to tell you that your role is impacted and we no longer have a job for you at Google,'" she wrote. "My heart started racing, I could hear it coming out of my chest."

She said: "I acted as I've seen myself act on the rare occasion of a car accident: exit the situation as fast as possible and return to normalcy. I left my bedroom and went to shuffle my kids through our morning routine, but I wasn't myself.

"I felt like I was in a fog. I pretended to be calm, but I felt I was one kid's tantrum away from losing it that morning."

According to LinkedIn, Hermon joined Google in 2014, and worked in various roles in software engineering, becoming a director of engineering in 2021.

Pichai sent a memo to staff at around 5:30 a.m. ET on January 20 informing them that the company was slashing roughly 6% of its global workforce across various functions and divisions.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote in the memo. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

Googlers have expressed shock about the abrupt and impersonal nature of the layoffs with some being let go after years at the company, and others only finding out after they were unable to badge into the office.

Hermon wrote in her post that she had always thought Google was "too fat" and that she wished "we were one of these companies who let go of the lower 5% performers on a yearly basis."

Now that she has been laid off "the thought of having to say the words 'I was fired' or 'I'm no longer with Google' was too painful."