• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 11, 2022

Two students studying in Russia went public late last week on LinkedIn with claims that Google rescinded their internship offers while studying at a Russian university.

Egyptian national Khaled Mohamed, a software engineer at Huawei and student in Russia, had accepted an offer to work as a Google intern in Zurich, Switzerland. He was scheduled to start later this year.

“In February, I accepted an offer for a position at Google Zurich,” Mohamed wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Yesterday, that offer was rescinded. The reason is because I used a Russian address.”

Mohamed wrote that when asked to provide his address, he assumed it was to deliver his “work device for my onboarding.” Since Mohamed was still at the university, he used his dorm's address.

“It's heartbreaking to say the least,” he wrote. “As someone who always wanted to join Google, being denied the opportunity for no fault of mine leaves me feeling hopeless and extremely disappointed.”

Mohamed offered to give his recruiter a home address in Egypt if the dorm address wasn't appropriate, but said that at the time, earlier this year, it did not seem important.

Google cited security concerns and sanctions when asked to explain the job offer withdrawal, according to Business Insider, which initially broke the news.

Fellow student Mahmood Darwish also experienced a similar situation.

“Even if there are sanctions that forbid Google from hiring candidates in Russia, we are willing to relocate to our home countries and continue the process from there,” Darwish wrote. “Google didn't give us a chance to rectify the situation nor a room for workarounds. A very simple deferment of the offer until things cool down or until we leave Russia would have been more than acceptable. A public statement might have even been enough.”

A software engineer at Amazon working from India called Google’s decision “unacceptable, and wrote that “rejection based on ethnicity is wrong. Even though you are not a Russian, still even denying a Russian is also wrong just solely because his country is waging war.”

Alexksandr Chuklin, research engineer at Google Zurich, chimed in by apologizing first, and then offer to get an official position on the decision.