Woman's Former Boss From An Unpaid Internship Calls Her A 'Selfish Opportunist' After She Ignored Her LinkedIn Message
It seems like she won't be getting a letter of recommendation from her former boss any time soon.
TikTok A woman named Jess Albotra was looking to start her career fresh out of college and landed herself an unpaid internship with a very, very small publication (she was one of three employees) and thought that she had built a good rapport with the people she was working with.
Once her three-month internship had ended and after some time job-hopping and advancing her career, she had been working at Google when her former manager reached out to her over LinkedIn.
Jess Albotra's former boss reached out to her on LinkedIn after 6 years of no contact.
“I wasn’t 100% sure if I was going to share this on here but I got this insane message on LinkedIn and I want to share it with you guys,” Albotra said during the TikTok video that started it all.
She provided context surrounding the situation, talking about how she had tried to pursue her career in journalism six years ago via the unpaid internship, but “the internship itself was not enjoyable.”
Albotra wasn’t given projects that she wanted to work on and was only able to write whatever they told her to write. Needless to say, she never really kept in touch with her former coworkers until her old boss messaged her two months before she posted the video on February 27, 2023.
“I hadn’t heard from her over the last six years and I just didn’t get good vibes,” she said. “I’m very much someone who follows my instinct and I just didn’t think it was coming from a genuine place.”
The message was a very simple “Happy New Year!” message, with a little added flavor. Her old boss claimed to be “proud” of her and said it was “amazing” that she was working at Google now. She ended the message by asking if Albotra wanted to catch up over a phone call, but she decided she wouldn’t respond.
“I just felt like I didn’t need to respond,” she explained. “I didn’t need to put any energy into it and the message that I received more recently just proves why I made the right decision.”
Her former boss insulted her and hoped she would be ‘part of the Google layoffs.’
“Wow, it’s a shame to think that you’ve turned into the kind of person that you have,” her former boss wrote to her at 4:40 AM on whatever day she sent this message. “I always detected a selfish and opportunist[ic] side when you interned for me at [———] back in 2017, but for you to actually ignore a message from a former superior is beyond low.”
Albotra shared both of the screenshots to remind people that they don’t owe anyone anything — there are so many people that you will network with that could “switch up” on a dime when they aren’t given what they feel is owed to them.
“I wasn’t messaging to beg for anything, I was simply congratulating you and you’ve ignored me,” her former boss continued. “I hope you’re part of the Google layoffs and may karma treat you deservingly both personally and professionally.”
That’s no way to treat…well, anyone at all. Especially not on a website where you’re supposed to be behaving professionally. Albotra provides an update on how her former boss replied to her newfound infamy.
She claims that her LinkedIn account was hacked, but someone else proved it wasn’t.
In what Albotra believed would be her last post on the matter, she posted a screenshot of the Instagram story her former boss posted. In the post, she claimed that her LinkedIn had been hacked.
“Good morning everyone! My LinkedIn was recently hacked and I’ve since just retrieved it,” she wrote. “I was horrified to see that this fraud artist was sending a series of harassing and unprofessional messages to former colleagues.”
“Fraud artist” is a peculiar way to describe oneself, as a commenter on Albotra was able to (not-so-shockingly) confirm that her former boss had not been hacked.
“Wait WHAT,” the commenter wrote. “I sent her an insta dm of your vid earlier yesterday and she responded with ‘what makes you think what I said was awful?’”
In a third update video, Albotra shares the screenshot forwarded to her by the commenter, where her former boss says “Jess started the ignorance by not replying. I was simply stating my views.”
Well, it seems she won’t mind the thousands of people stating their views after she exposed herself as a “fraud artist” in her former colleague’s DMs.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.