- Shruti Dhumak navigated maternity leave amid Google’s AI-industry shift and layoffs.
- She split up her leave to maintain visibility and manage family support from India.
- Dhumak said she focused on self-improvement and open communication to regain her work efficiency.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Shruti Dhumak, a cloud customer engineer in Google’s Boston office who gave birth in February 2023. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her employment history.
Before I had my son, I doubted how I was going to manage being this overly ambitious person with motherhood.
I’ve been with Google for about four years. I had my first child in February 2023 and split up my maternity leave into three phases to make the most of the temporary support I had when my family visited.
Between Google’s policy of six months of maternity leave, one month of prepartum leave, and one month of paid time off, I had a total of eight months away from work. I knew I was fortunate to have this time off because it’s rare in the US, but going on leave and the anxiety of being replaced while I was away was one of the hardest things I’ve dealt with.
I’m a customer engineer, and a large part of my role revolves around managing relationships with our cloud clients. If someone takes over for me, the customers end up being closer to that representative, and I risk losing my accounts to someone else.
I was also paranoid that my absence or my performance below my peak once I returned would make me more susceptible to a layoff. Two weeks before my delivery, Google announced a 12,000-person layoff. As someone on an H-1B visa, a layoff would mean I’d have to find another job in a matter of weeks or risk having to move back to India with a newborn.
When I came back to work, I wasn’t 100% myself — not as a person and not as an employee. I wasn’t 100% efficient. I had moments where I broke down and lost my train of thought during a call.
Despite my efforts, business partners preferred some other senior people for some responsibilities. To add to it, Google was entering the artificial-intelligence industry. Being away for months made me feel like I was behind by many years.
But I was able to turn my performance around. In 2024, I got awards for my performance. It’s just the opposite of how the prior year went.
There were four things I did to make the transition easier on myself.
1. Split up my leave
Google offers employees the flexibility to take their maternity leave for up to a year after the baby is born. I broke up my leave into three stages, which allowed me to come back to work periodically to ensure I was visible and my work wasn’t forgotten.
I took my first break a month before the baby was born. I returned in my third month after the delivery and went back on leave in September, November, December, and January.
It was designed based on who was there to help me with the child throughout the year: first my parents and then my in-laws.
2. Highlighted my work
Nobody is going to talk about me until I do — that’s something I’ve struggled with in my previous companies.
I made sure to speak up when things weren’t going right and collect evidence of my efforts and achievements.
I took advantage of the help I had and spent evenings and weekends taking exams and completing certifications to upskill myself and show others that I was coming up to speed.
3. Had open, honest conversations
What helped me through the year was my manager. She saw what was happening when I missed things, because I’ve been a good performer all these years.
I shared everything with her openly during one-on-ones, which helped because she understood my challenges. She also helped me maintain visibility with upper management.
It made a world of a difference to have a female manager and a work culture where men could empathize too. My job involves a lot of talking and explaining, and I suffered from shortness of breath during my third trimester. My male counterparts recognized this and asked me to take breaks and go off-camera, which helped me work until the day I left for leave.
I also built my network and spoke to women who are managers in other teams in the company. Women who have been outperformers shared their experiences crying secretly after they became parents, and nobody said they had it all sorted out. Now I share my journey with others.
4. Took it one day at a time
During the wave of tech layoffs in 2022, I had at least three close friends who were laid off from Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which lingered in my mind and made me paranoid about my own situation.
The stress and postpartum depression aren’t behind me, but I decided to take it one day at a time.
I decided to be laser-focused and do things as they come up. There have been times I feel like delaying a reply but do it anyway because I know it could lead to more tasks that I can add to my annual review.
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Correction: January 13, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated the year Dhumak gave birth. It was 2023, not 2022.