Sudden layoffs from jobs are tough to process and it gets worse when questions of employees remain unanswered. In one such case, an Indian employee detailed his sudden layoff from a US-based company in a Reddit post which has gone viral. According to the post, the employee was caught off guard by the termination, which took place on October 1, over a three-minute video call.
“It was literally like any other day, woke up at 8:30, logged into work at 9 and saw a calendar invite for 11. It was a mandatory meeting with our COO for all India employees. I joined it at 11, he joined at 11:01, disabled everyone’s cameras and mics, casually let us know that they had “made the difficult decision of letting most of their Indian work force go”,’ the post read. The employee clarified that the layoffs were not performance-based but part of an internal organisational restructuring.
The employee added that the COO instructed them to await an email regarding their job status and ended the call without addressing any questions.
‘No time to prepare’
Sharing the emotional impact of the layoff, the Reddit post further stated that the three-minute video call left Indian employees “shocked, stunned, frustrated, stressed”. “No prior intimation, no time to prepare. They have offered October’s salary to paid at the end of the month and any leaves would be encashed. None of it even remotely makes up for what I’m feeling right now. This is the first time I’ve been laid off and it just truly…sucks,” read the post.
The viral post led to a flurry of comments from users extending help to the employee and some even calling the post fake.
‘AMERICA, I LOVE YOU’
Another similar case involves Ananya Joshi, who, after completing her master’s in Biotechnology from Northwestern University in 2024, began working in the US under the F‑1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme. She was laid off during a company-wide downsizing and struggled to secure a new role within her limited STEM OPT window.
When months of interviews and networking yielded no results, she was forced to leave the country. Joshi shared a tearful video of her departure. Joshi described the moment of leaving America as “by far the hardest step in this journey”. “Though short-lived, I really appreciate the life you gave me. AMERICA, I LOVE YOU,” he social media post read.
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