Ex Microsoft Employee Shares Post On Being Fired With "Entire Team"

A former employee of Microsoft, who worked at the tech giant for eight years, has shared that his entire team was laid off this week. This comes nearly two months after Microsoft announced earlier that it would cut 10,000 jobs by the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2023.

Vandan Kaushik served as a senior product manager at Microsoft. In a LinkedIn post, he detailed his time at the company and said that being fired was difficult for him. 

Mr Kaushik wrote, “Like many of my colleagues, me and my team had a tough start to the week. My entire team was eliminated as part of Microsoft layoffs this week”. He added, “Although I had prepared for the possibility, hearing the news was still difficult”.

The former Microsoft employee said that while his eight-year journey came to an abrupt end, “it has been extremely rewarding”.

Vandan Kaushik talked about the several positions he held at the company and said that he “thoroughly enjoyed my ride”.

Highlighting the moment when he learned about being laid off, Mr Kaushik said, “the immediate leadership response was not to rush to complete the transition but to check in on each other and ensure that we were all doing okay”.  

He added that it was “heartening to see” that those who remained unaffected by mass layoff showed empathy and sympathy to him and his team.  “In my two decades of working, I have rarely seen such a positive and supportive attitude from colleagues and the leadership team. And for this I'm truly grateful and thankful!” Mr Kaushik wrote.

Further, Vandan Kaushik said he will now think about his next steps and work to improve his skills.

In January this year, Microsoft announced its plan of firing 10,000 employees as the firm struggled with a slump in the computer market. The same month, the tech giant, in a company blog post, announced its “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, the research lab which developed chatbot ChatGPT.