Employee Learns He Is Laid Off Through Co-Worker's DM: 'I Knew I'd Done Good Work, Couldn't Prove It'

Layoffs have dominated headlines and conversations across the internet in recent months, with tech giants like Meta, Amazon leading the wave of job cuts. The latest round at Oracle has once again sent shockwaves among the salaried workforce – not just for the scale, but for the manner of execution.

Imagine starting your day, ready to dive into work, only to be met with an email that reads: ‘Today is your last working day’. Abrupt, impersonal and jarring – this has been the reality for thousands of employees in the recent months. A Reddit post making rounds on social media has struck a chord online, as an employee shared how he was blindsided by the news of his layoff – not through emails, but through a co-worker’s DM. He wrote, “I knew I’d done

gone work. I just couldn’t prove it.”

The co-worker reached the employee asking if he had heard anything and that she had just been let go. Wishing her good luck, the employee went to open Slack, where his access was removed. “I sat there for a second not really processing it. Then I messaged a coworker on LinkedIn to see what was going on. He had no idea. I messaged my previous manager at the company and he confirmed HR had sent me an email. An email. That’s how I found out.”

The employee then revealed that he never received any official email – unsure whether it landed in spam or had not reached yet. However, he was reading his termination news from a former manager sitting at his home at 9am. Seeking clarity, he messaged his direct manager on LinkedIn. When the manager responded, “sorry to hear that”, it only added to his frustration, feeling like a cold, corporate formality. The story took an unexpected turn when the manager messaged again – he had been laid off too.

“The part that stung the most wasn’t the job. It was realising that I couldn’t even account for what I’d accomplished. I Knew I’d done good work. I couldn’t prove it. Everything was in systems I no longer had access to. My brain had the fuzzy version. The receipts were behind a login screen I’d never seen again. I ended up spending the first two days just trying to reconstruct my own history before I could even start applying. Slack messages I’d screenshotted at some point. Old performance reviews I’d saved to Google Drive out of habit. Calendar history on my personal phone. It was humbling”, the employee expressed.

Several people resonated with his experience. One user commented, “Something familiar happened to me. Normally at certain points in the year, I e-mail summaries of what I have done to my personal e-mail so that I have it in case something like this happens. However, the last company had a hard and fast rule that you are not allowed to send anything to a personal e-mail address. Of course, then they abruptly cut off all access and later sent a note to our personal email.”

Another user commented, “I got a phone call from my boss’ boss’ boss. Merger. Best thing that ever happened to me. Forced out of a dying industry. Set me up for 21 years with a growing company. Good Luck moving forward.”

Another user suggested naming the company or sharing the experience on Glassdoor, warning others so they don’t face the same situation.