When Meta let me go nine months ago, the words that stuck were not “restructuring,” “reduction” or “realignment.” It was the tag that they subtly inserted into their conversations — the hint that I was a “low performer.” It was a blow I didn’t see coming. I had hustled, hit goals and kept up in an environment that moved at warp speed. But with one sentence, in a single instant, I went from being a member of the biggest tech company on the planet to someone who was just “not good enough.”
At first, I tried to tell myself it was paperwork. A justification. A corporate script. Some other thing they had to say in order to fit me into a box. But the more time I spend looking for work, the heavier that label becomes. It is nestled between the lines of every interview, every recruiter call, every nice rejection email that comes at you after the “we’ll be in touch” stage. It’s like I have an invisible stain that only I can see but everyone else somehow feels.
When I began to apply after the layoff, I was confident. My résumé had Meta on it. I had created products that millions of people used. I had worked on systems most engineers or analyst dreamed of only working in. I figured the market would gobble me up within weeks. Instead, nothing happened. Weeks passed. Then months. I saw jobs disappear faster than they were posted. I did five rounds of interviews, and then got ghosted. I received vague, lukewarm or contradictory responses. And the more I heard, “We went with someone whose experience aligns a bit closer,” it was another reminder that perhaps that “low performer” box actually did matter.
What hurt most was seeing how much of the tech industry operates on perception. Perhaps Meta was trying to solve a headcount issue, not a performance one, but I had to view myself as that label. Even when I knew that I had solid work to back me up, I’d hesitate in interviews — question my answers and shrink away instead of showing the confidence that matched the résumé. It’s difficult to disassociate oneself from a label when it’s the last thing a company ever said about you.
I’ve spoken with other former Meta employees over the past few months, and the story is all too common. Some experienced layoffs despite top performance reviews. Others were quietly shifted into lower buckets as part of internal reshuffles. Many were told things that sounded like performance issues but had more to do with budgets, reorganizations or previous priorities evaporating from one day to the next. But once that label is on your exit paperwork — even unofficially — it follows. Recruiters aren’t hearing the whole picture. They hear the implication.
The job market hasn’t helped. It is a reaction to the flood of tech layoffs, which have left many talented people now competing for fewer jobs. Companies can be choosy. They run deeper background checks. They talk to previous managers. And if a hiring manager hears so much as an echo of the word “performance issue,” your application goes to the bottom of the pile before you even get an opportunity to explain.
Now nine months later, I stood in the gym and battered away what little self-belief remained. I’ve learned to speak the truth of what happened, free from any apology for it. I’ve had to figure out how to show the work I’m proud of rather than the box that someone put me into. And I’ve learned that a layoff — especially in the kind of wild reshuffling it feels like the tech world is going through — doesn’t nullify the years of real impact I had made.
What I hadn’t anticipated, however, is the number of doors that opened once I stopped viewing myself through Meta’s last impression of me. And when I changed how I discussed my experience, so did my interviews. I started getting callbacks again. I started getting interest again. And, if only for the first time in nearly a year, that label seems to be starting to wear off.
I’m still job hunting. I’m still grappling with the ghost of that language. But I’m also starting to understand something important: getting tagged as a low performer in a cultural climate of impossible velocity and constant reinvention does not necessarily make you an actual low performer in the real world. You become a survivor of a system that wasn’t created to value stability, nuance or humanity.
Some day soon, an employer will take a look at my whole story — not just the ending someone else wrote for me — and see what I have to offer. And if that happens, then I’ll know closing the book on Meta wasn’t a sentencing. It was just a transition.
