A person who was fired from Google last week in the company’s wave of staff cuts says he was on leave from work to care for his mother who is terminally ill with cancer.
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Paul Baker was on leave for about a month when he received an email saying the company was about to fire him along with some 12,000 others. he told Insider.
“While I was on care leave due to my close relative’s terminal cancer, I too was laid off. After the initial shock, it turned into sadness because I miss people,” he also wrote on LinkedIn.
Related: More than 1,600 tech workers will be laid off per day on average by 2023, according to a new report
On Jan. 20, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees taking responsibility for hiring “for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Baker told Insider he was on leave and that a friend had told him about the layoffs, then discovered his work laptop had been “cut off,” the outlet wrote.
He was a video producer at Google, according to his LinkedIn, and had been with the company since 2018. Baker told Insider he felt “shock and sadness”. The outlet said it had verified the furlough period, as well as his severance email and previous employment at Google.
Related: In a viral TikTok, a former YouTube employee talks about being fired during a business trip
“I will really miss it,” he said.
Baker also told the outlet that he has not received any information about how his severance pay would be affected by the fact that he was on career leave to care for his mother.
said Pichai in the note the company will provide “six months of healthcare, job placement and immigration support to those affected”.
Still, he told Insider that he would love to return to the company.
“If ever a position at Google opens up to another position as a video producer, I’d take it in a heartbeat,” he said.
