After 4 years at Nykaa and LBB, I’m struggling to come to terms with what feels like a silent layoff.

I never imagined I would be writing a post like this.

After spending 4 years with LBB and later Nykaa, I recently found myself leaving not because I wanted to, but because the team I had poured my heart into was being shut down.

What makes this difficult isn’t just the loss of a job.

It’s the feeling that somewhere along the way, the people behind the work stopped mattering.

Over the years, I gave this role everything I could. Like many others on my team, I went above and beyond whenever needed. When my manager went on maternity leave, I stepped in and took ownership of responsibilities that needed to be handled. I worked late when required. I worked on days off when there was no one else available. Not because I was asked to, but because I genuinely cared about the work and the team.

That’s why the last year has been so hard to understand.

There were no appraisal discussions.

No conversations about growth.

No performance bonus despite it being a part of our CTC.

Then came the news that the LBB team was being shut down.

Around 20 of us were informed verbally about a fixed last working day and asked to submit resignations. Later, some employees were also placed on PIP despite not having gone through formal appraisal or performance review discussions.

I understand that businesses change.

I understand that acquisitions don’t always work out the way people hope.

I understand that difficult decisions have to be made.

What I struggle to understand is why transparency and empathy are often the first things to disappear when those decisions are made.

When a company acquires a smaller business, it also acquires the dreams, hard work, loyalty, and trust of the people who built it.

Those people aren’t just headcount on a spreadsheet.

They’re the ones who stayed late to meet deadlines.

The ones who solved problems when no one was looking.

The ones who believed in the vision enough to give years of their lives to it.

What hurts isn’t that the chapter ended.

What hurts is feeling like it ended without the respect, communication, and dignity that people deserve after giving so much of themselves.

Maybe that’s why this feels less like a restructuring and more like what many call a silent layoff.

I’m sharing this not to attack anyone, but because I know there are countless employees across companies going through similar experiences and quietly carrying the same disappointment.

If you’ve been through something like this, how did you move forward?

Because right now, I’m trying to remind myself that my value was never defined by how this chapter ended.

And that sometimes, the hardest goodbyes are the ones you never saw coming.