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Laid-off Meta employee shares emotional post after nearly 10 years at company: ‘Yesterday I was training new engineer’
Gary Tay said he had worked at the company for 3,544 days, around 9 years and 9 months, after being hired in London and later working in Singapore.
A Singapore-based Meta employee who was laid off in the company’s latest round of job cuts has caught the internet’s attention after sharing an emotional LinkedIn post about losing his role just a day after training a new engineer.
“Yesterday i was training up my new pod engineer, glad i managed to squeeze in everything. Today. I’m laid off,” wrote Gary Tay, an AdTech Business Support Engineer who spent nearly a decade at Meta .
Tay said he had worked at the company for 3,544 days, around 9 years and 9 months, after being hired in London and later working in Singapore. “Longer than 99.5% of current employees globally. 99.9% longer than anyone in the APAC office,” he wrote.
Reflecting on his career, Tay said he was grateful for the opportunity to be part of Facebook’s early years and highlighted his long stint in the tech industry. “Not many Singaporeans can say they have been a engineer at Meta & Microsoft for over 15yrs,” he added.
Tay also spoke about adapting to the rise of AI in recent months. “This year was exceptional. Spent a huge amount of time retraining myself with AI and developing systems for the teams. Speed up workload by 2-300% while still keeping SLA with the world largest clients,” he wrote.
“AI is here to stay, apparently the human isn’t,” Tay added. He concluded his post saying that he would now reassess his career plans while preparing to welcome his newborn child in July.
(Also Read: Meta layoffs: All about the severance package offered to laid-off employees)
Meta layoffs
Meta on Wednesday began laying off nearly 8,000 employees globally as part of a broader restructuring effort aimed at reducing costs and improving efficiency while continuing major investments in AI.
According to a Bloomberg report, employees in Singapore began receiving layoff notifications at around 4 am local time. Staff in Europe and the US were also expected to be informed in their respective time zones.
An internal memo from Meta HR chief Janelle Gale reportedly said the company would also reduce managerial roles to create flatter organisational structures. “We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Gale wrote, according to a report by Business Insider.
