‘It’s been gruelling’: Ex-Meta employee talks about mental health toll of mass layoffs

People often share their professional success stories on LinkedIn. Recently, a former Meta worker spoke about an opposite experience and it appears that many people are relating to her. Andrea Guzmán García-Luna, a former Meta employee, wrote a LinkedIn post about how the looming threat of layoffs and its subsequent financial loss has been detrimental to her mental health.

In her now-viral post, García-Luna said that in the past six years, she was laid off by Meta twice, once in February 2018 when the Instagram Community team was disintegrated and the second time was just last week. She said she and others in her team had been bracing for possible layoffs since November but no amount of contingency planning has helped her stay calm.

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Talking about her failing coping mechanism she wrote, “I built scenarios and budgets, put plans on hold, relied on therapy and tried to work and deliver as best as I could. But when the day came I still cried for two hours straight.”

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She explained the whole experience as “gruelling” and questioned if mass layoffs are fair. She concluded by saying that she now aims to “rest for a little while” and “to rebuild and gain confidence” and asked recruiters to hire ex-Meta employees.

In the comments, many people lauded her for being vulnerable and shared how they grappled with the same issues after mass layoffs by tech giants like Google and Twitter.