My Heart Sank: Among Indian Meta Employees Laid Off is a California New Mom on Maternity Leave
- Those who were affected by the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history took to social media platforms to share their frustrations, and ask for leads to help find other job opportunities.
Bay Area resident Anneka Patel found out that she was among 11,000 employees that were laid off from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, in the wee hours of the morning. Currently, on maternity leave, the new mom woke up at 3 am to pump for her three-month-old baby girl, Emilia, she shared in a LinkedIn post.
She checked her work email as she was “anticipating the email from Mark Zuckerberg about the layoffs,” she wrote. She did find the email, “but there were no details about which teams or who were impacted.” Her daughter woke up at 4 a.m., so she nursed her. Half an hour later, she got a text from her manager that she had been laid off. A few hours later, at 5:35 a.m. she got the email that she had been included in the layoffs.
“My heart sank,” she wrote.
Patel, who moved from London to California nine years ago, called working at Meta her “dream job.” She said she was “grateful and thankful to everyone I worked with for making my time there so special.”
“The layoffs are considered the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history,” CNN noted. It said the “job cuts come as Meta confronts a range of challenges to its core business and makes an uncertain and costly bet on pivoting to the metaverse.” They also come “amid a spate of layoffs at other tech firms in recent months as the high-flying sector reacts to high inflation, rising interest rates and fears of a looming recession.”
A day before the firing CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a blog post to employees announcing the layoffs. He wrote that he was sharing “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history.” He shared that he had decided “to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.” He added that the company is “also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.” He took “accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
Like Patel, many took to social media platforms to share their frustrations, talk about how they were affected and also ask for leads to help find other opportunities. Unlike the outpouring on Twitter after the recent mega-firing, many Meta employees shared their feelings on LinkedIn.
Himanshu V., an IIT Kharagpur graduate, was laid off just two days after he relocated to Canada to take up his new job with Meta.“My heart goes out to everyone facing a difficult situation right now,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “What’s next for me? Honestly, I have no idea! I’m looking forward to whatever comes next. Let me know if you know of any position or hiring for a software engineer (Canada or India).”
Similarly, Manjur Ansari of Hyderabad, also relocated to Canada to join Meta, and was laid off a couple of weeks after joining. “Even though this was a short time at the company, everyone was extremely supportive and I had a great time there,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Wishing everyone else going through the same situation has all the support they need. I’m really sad that this happened, but I’ll always have memories of the amazing people I met.”
Those workers who weren’t impacted by the layoffs also took to social media to offer support.
There were some words of advice as well.