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Now here's today's show.
This is Planet Money from NPR.
January of 2023 was a pretty rough month if you worked in tech.
PayPal announced that they're going to lay off 2000 people.
IBM was laying off nearly 4000 people, and news leaked that Amazon was getting ready to lay off 18,000 people.
At the time, Ashka was a product engineer at Amazon, working on things like their search engine.
Do you remember the day?
What day?
It was like, were you anticipating getting laid off, or was it a surprise to you?
So we were aware that the decision would be given on 18 January, but, like, not in my wildest dreams.
I had imagined that I would be the one impacted.
But then, yeah, this happened.
Ashka thought she was working on a really successful team.
There had been an all hands meeting a couple of months before these layoffs, and she says management singled them out, told them in front of everyone, you guys are doing great.
So when she got the news, she was really shocked.
Yeah, it was pretty bad on that day.
Like, I cried a lot because I had dedicated a lot of time of my life towards shining at my job and, like, performing at my best.
Right as Ashke was being laid off from Amazon, another tech worker named Nalanjan was facing the same thing at Google.