A married couple with a 4-month-old baby were both laid off by Google, while one of them was on parental leave

On Friday, Google’s mass layoffs impacted a married couple who were both on paid leave with their 4-month old baby.

Google recently announced their plans to lay off 12,000 employees, or around 6.4% of its global workforce, Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of parent company Alphabet, told staff in a memo on Friday.

Pichai informed the staff that he accepted “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai told staff in the email. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

The couple, who have asked to be called Steve and Allie, moved to California when Allie got a job with Google.  Steve started working with them 2 years later.

The couple have been dating since high school and had their first child in the fall of 2022.  Steve took 2 months off near the end of 2022 and planned to take a further 2 months off in March.

They found not long after Google’s announcements that they would both be laid off by the company.

Allie was a marketing manager at Google, while Steve was a research-operations manager. Allie said they “didn’t really see each other every day at work” as they worked in different departments but they sometimes met for lunch and also used Google’s bike trails, Allie said.

Allie said she “absolutely” enjoyed her “six wonderful years” working at the company, praising both her workmates and the company benefits. Steve also said that Google had invested heavily into its staff with the parental leave being one of the major lures for him.

Allie said there had been an “overwhelming response” after she announced the news of their layoffs, with people from both Google and other companies contacting her, in some cases with offers of employment.

The couple said they will now focus their energy on growing their business White Cube Media.

Allie looked on the positive side of the situation by saying “This was the push that we needed.”