Surbhi Gupta, an engineer from the US appeared on Netflix’s popular show Indian Matchmaking, where matchmaker Sima Taparia brings soulmates together. Although she matched with a Texas-based school counselor, things didn’t workout between them. But that disappointment was just a precursor to her shocking termination from Meta, leaving her jobless along with lakhs of tech professionals globally.
Sleepless nights and separation
Hit by the mass layoffs, Gupta told BBC that she didn’t expect to be fired and the separation from Meta felt like a breakup. The engineer working in the US since 2009, added that despite performing well at work, she got an email at six in the morning. Highlighting the chaos in the tech sector currently, Gupta also shared how none of her colleagues had slept the night before.
Locked out of office gym
One of 11,000 employees laid off by Meta, the engineer and former Miss Bharat-California, also mentioned that she had worked hard for 15 years to build a life in the US. She was unable to access her computer and was also locked out of the office gym after the termination. While many CEOs including the bosses at Cisco and Amazon have justified the layoffs, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has taken responsibility for the job cuts.
Meta trying to soften the blow
He has also addressed concerns of workers from India and other nationalities on H1B visas who have a limited grace period to find another job. Zuckerberg wrote to them that dedicated immigration specialists are available to help out laid off workers with visa issues. Among other peculiar cases, an employee of Meta from India was fired as part of the layoffs, just two days after he landed in Canada for the job.
The layoffs coupled with a hiring freeze also hit another software engineer Tianyi Gao on an H1B visa in the US, when he quit Google to join Amazon, only to see the offer being pulled back by the e-commerce giant.
