Google’s announcement on Monday that it would restructure itself under a new parent company called Alphabet shocked almost everyone in the business world from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.
But nobody, it seems, was more stunned than Google’s own employees, who all week have been posting reactions on Quora, the online forum for answering other peoples’ questions. Googlers from programming interns to senior engineers have been posting descriptions of the Googleplex atmosphere immediately after the Alphabet news broke. By their accounts, work pretty much ground to a halt as they tried to make sense of the changes: The interns’ Google Hangout blew up with chatter; some were scared and unsure which Alphabet subsidiary they actually reported to; others celebrated their Google (GOOG) stockholdings as the company’s shares surged on the announcement. One engineer named Jorg Brown posted about experiencing the five stages of grief, starting with denial: “This can’t be real. Someone took over the keyboard while Larry went to the bathroom, perhaps,” he wrote.
Below, more Googlers react to Alphabet:
