‘Yesterday I trained my new engineer. Today, I’m laid off’: Meta laid off employee shares emotional post

For thousands of tech workers, layoffs have become another headline in a long season of uncertainty.

But one LinkedIn post from a longtime Meta employee this week hit people differently because it carried both pride and heartbreak in the same breath.

Gary Tay, an AdTech Business Support Engineer at Meta, shared on LinkedIn that he had been laid off after spending nearly a decade at the company, just months before the birth of his child.

“Today. I’m laid off. 3,544 days (9yrs, ~9mths),” Tay wrote in his post.

Tay said he was hired in London and later retrenched in Singapore, adding that he had stayed at the company longer than “99.5% of current employees globally” and “99.9% longer than anyone in the APAC office.”

Reflecting on his journey, he said he was grateful for the opportunity to be part of Facebook’s early years and noted that not many Singaporeans could say they had worked as engineers at both Meta and Microsoft for over 15 years.

He also spoke about spending the past year retraining himself in AI and building systems for teams. According to Tay, those systems helped improve work speed by “200-300%” while maintaining service-level agreements for major clients.

“AI is here to stay, apparently the human isn’t,” he wrote.

The final line of the post drew widespread attention online. “I’ll be reassessing my career options in the next few months while I patiently wait for my newborn to come in July,” Tay said.

Netizens reaction

The post quickly spread across LinkedIn, with professionals from the tech industry leaving messages of support, encouragement and concern over the growing impact of AI-led restructuring and layoffs.

“Your last paragraph is a great positioning, a great reframe. I am sure you will find something you will revel in in no time,” a user wrote.

“My heart goes out to you and everyone who got laid off. Such a long time at any company makes you grow attached,” another said.

“They keep telling everyone that AI isn’t replacing people. You just proved that is not true,” a third noted.