The Big Tech Show: Nothing personal - what it's like to be laid off by email

The Big Tech Show with Adrian Weckler

The tech industry has been hit with a spate of mass layoffs over the last few months. One trend emerging from this is the approach some of these companies take, using email to deliver the news to employees.

This week on the Big Tech Show, Adrian speaks to Jonathan Bellack, one of the 12,000 Google employees in the US who woke up to an email telling him he was being let go.

Jonathan says while he had planned to leave Google at the end of the year, waking up to an email about being laid off was not something he expected.

“When it's completely remote and you're in a remote workplace, you're alone when it happens. And because I would suspect for security purposes, things get locked down pretty quickly.

The Big Tech Show: Nothing personal - what it's like to be laid off by email

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“You can't exactly walk down the hall to your co-workers and say, what the heck is going on?”

Adrian is also joined by Peter Cosgrove, managing director of Futurewise and Owen Reidy General Secretary of the ICTU, to discuss the process of email lay offs and if we can expect this more in the future.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Square.