An ex-Google software engineer who was laid off 16 years after starting as
an intern, described coming to terms with losing his "one and only
career."

"Two weeks ago, my entire team was impacted by the Google layoff," Joel
Leitch, who held the role of tech lead across both the shopping and
payments projects at Google, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Saturday.

"It was a complete shock to me and I am still perplexed as to why Google
would let go of so many experienced, smart, talented, gritty, high-
performing employees," he continued.

"It has been a slow process to come to terms with my new reality as Google
has been my one and only career," Leitch said.

According to his LinkedIn profile, the software engineer first worked at
the tech giant as an intern in January 2005, before joining another tech
company from January to June 2006, and going back to Google in July of
that same year after graduating from the University of Waterloo. He was
with the company until he was laid off.

"It was an absolute honour to have had the opportunity to work there for
so many years. The things that I will miss most are the people and the
relationships built," Leitch wrote in the post.

Leitch and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from
Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, sent a memo to
staff on January 20 announcing the company was laying off 6% of its
workforce � around 12,000 employees.

Pichai said that he took "full responsibility for the decisions that led
us here."

Leitch isn't alone in taking to LinkedIn after losing his job in the
layoffs that have swept the tech industry.

A Microsoft software engineer who is on an H1-B visa said she wondered
where she'd be living after losing her job, while a Google employee of 11
years wrote that he and his wife stared at each other in "disbelief" when
they learned they'd both been laid off from the company.

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