A laid-off Google engineer describes losing his 'only career' 16 years after starting as an intern

• An Ex-Googler described being laid off 16 years after he started as an intern.
• "Google has been my one and only career," Joel Leitch wrote in a LinkedIn post.

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.