With high inflation, recession on the horizon and crashing ad revenues, layoff season seems to have hit the US hard, as Meta and Disney are also trimming their workforce following Elon Musk’s Twitter. Huge numbers such as Meta’s 11,000 employees and Twitter’s 50 per cent workforce, make workers look like mere statistics, but they hide human stories behind them. One such story of a manager at Twitter who threw up when he was asked to fire hundreds of his team members by Musk.
Overwhelmed by Musk’s diktat
According to a report in the New York Times, an engineering manager was so overwhelmed by the pressure to sack so many of his colleagues, that he vomited in a dustbin. His team members were among the 3,700 people at Twitter who learnt that they’ve been fired after losing access to their work email and slack. Indian Twitter employees part of the mass layoff also opened up about feeling humiliated and uncertain about the future.
The human cost of layoffs
Tales of pain among laid off employees also include accounts of pregnant women who lost jobs at the social media platform. Other such stories were also shared by Facebook employees, among whom an Indian woman wrote on LinkedIn, how she learnt about her termination when she woke up at 3 AM to feed her baby while on maternity leave. As Meta employees called for layoffs on the director level in anonymous reviews, Musk cited top executives quitting Twitter as a reason for a possible bankruptcy.
Hard times for those who stay
As for those who stay at Twitter, tough times await them with Musk’s diktat about 40 hour work weeks, right after thousands of their colleagues were fired even after working 12 hours a day. On the other hand the Twitter product manager seen sleeping in the office to meet deadlines, managed to survive Musk’s layoffs.
