Aaron Neyer; Sylvia Duran; Camila Ferraz; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
After you’re laid off, what comes next? For many tech workers, there’s no easy answer. Following who worked at Meta prior to joining Google as a privacy program manager eight months before the 2023 layoffs.
I was at a coffee shop with my husband when a news alert popped up on his phone saying that Google was laying off 12,000 people that day. We’d both survived layoffs before — my husband works at Amazon and I’d been at Facebook prior to Google — so layoff news generally didn’t startle us; we were used to it. I’m sure it’s not me, I thought. But then I tried to log into my computer, and my password was rejected.
I very quickly recognized the silver lining of the opportunity. I had six months’ severance. I’d never taken a break before — I’d been working like crazy since graduating from law school in 2012. I rested and spent more time with my kids. We took a family vacation. I started doing Pilates and got back into therapy. I used the time as a true sabbatical to reenergize myself for the next phase of my career.
After three months, I started applying for jobs. I turned down an offer from a consulting firm because that world didn’t feel like the right fit for me. Some big law firms approached me, and I took a contract role at a firm while continuing my job search. I started a new role in data privacy at for almost nine years in various roles, including as the first chief of staff to the VP of operations. She also headed YouTube Mexico during the pandemic. Prior to the 2023 layoff, she was the head of strategy and operations for YouTube’s Latin American and Canadian markets.
The night before the layoff, I missed dinner with my family to take a strategy call with the creator marketing team based in Singapore. The next morning, I tried to check my work calendar before breakfast and it wouldn’t load. People had been nervous about layoffs but thought low performers would be the only ones impacted. That’s not what happened.
Once I realized my role had been eliminated, I started bawling. I’d given everything to the company, like so many of us, and it wasn’t a possibility in my head that I would be laid off.
I gave myself the weekend to grieve. One of my best friends visited from Seattle to support me. Three days later, I during college and returned seven years later as a developer relations engineer, before being laid off in January 2023.
When I found out I was laid off, I felt almost a relief and a sense of openness. I suddenly had this blessing of a healthy severance to use to build what I wanted outside of Google.
I intermittently job-searched for a few months and almost joined an early-stage startup, but nothing quite landed. I also traveled a bit around the US, did a lot of reading and writing, and participated in a lot of community engagement. I have a thriving community here in Boulder and enjoy being in nature. I also became the executive director of a nonprofit I joined in 2022 called Consciousness Hacking Colorado — now relaunched as .
When I woke up that morning and saw the layoff email, I was so out of touch with reality that my first concern was that my team wouldn’t be able to access a document I’d been up late working on the night before. It took a bit of time for me to realize, “Wait, I lost my job.”
I jumped straight into practical things. A friend and former coworker who’d read about the layoffs told me she was hiring, so I jumped out of bed and did an interview, but I could hardly pay attention. I went back to Brazil for a week to be close to my childhood friends. For those of us in tech, it felt like the world was falling apart, but I’m from an island in the south of Brazil, and being there helped me keep that in perspective.
I ended up moving to Miami, where a lot of my friends had moved during the pandemic. Climate tech is one of my personal passions, and I took a remote consulting job with a nonprofit biodiversity lab based in Zurich for a few months.
On one of my trips to Zurich, I met my now-cofounder. Looking for a cofounder in the months prior was almost like dating — finding the right one was the most challenging part, and now that I have, it feels so right. Together, we incorporated biodiversityX, an AI-powered tech company providing real-time forest analytics, in Zurich.
Losing a job is traumatic, but it’s humbling to think about how much Google transformed my life. It was such a good place to grow and develop as a leader, and I miss the culture, the food, and the people.
Before, I thought a career had to be very linear — one promotion after another; tomorrow needs to be bigger than yesterday. Today, I see things as a bit more fluid and view the layoff as a blessing in disguise. Being an entrepreneur — the degree of responsibility and the speed at which we can move — is so freeing and rewarding. The pieces are coming together, and I’m grateful to Google for being such a great school.
