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Laid Off, Now What?

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#161

Post by JonLim »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #30
JonLim wrote: post #22

Does the 60 day timeline include the amount of time you need to be approved for the visa, as well? I wasn't laid off, but am in the process of changing employers with my TN visa. This is probably the least smooth part of the entire interviewing/job changing process, at least from my perspective, as a software dev who doesn't have a degree in computer science or computer engineering. Wish it were all a little more tra…

I _think_ if you have applied for Premium Processing and get the receipt, you can start working with the new employer. But please check with your employer's lawyers, as these things can keep changing and the rules are too complex for me to keep track of.

The lawyers have not mentioned anything near that, otherwise I'd be working right now!

My application used Premium Processing, and I got an RFE, so I'm still sitting here on my hands. It's frustrating, but is it worth asking the lawyers about being able to start since I'm in the process of the application?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#162

Post by cableshaft »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #55
mathattack wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t intend to seem callous, so please help educate me. If you marry a citizen, that accelerated the Green Card. If you marry a non-citizen, your situation is precarious, so why not rent rather than buy? I’m not arguing that the rules are right. (They are clearly wrong) Just that if you’re ina precarious situation, avoid doing things that make it worse. When I lived abroad, the expats were all aware of being on bo…

I am not offended and you have been polite, so please don't remove your posts. Renting vs buying is fine. We can choose to rent all our lives and frankly in the Bay Area buying isn't even that slam dunk of a decision anyway. My point was a bit more general. It's very common for people to argue 'technically' about how others should live their lives while missing their ground reality. For instance, it's easy to say "We…

Yeah, my boss is here on an H1B, and has been with the same company for I think 12 years now, even though the company has had many rough years and I'm sure he would have switched jobs already if not for his H1B status.

He's since married and has a kid, used to live in an apartment but now has a house, although he might be renting, I'm not sure.

I started dating and eventually married my wife, got two dogs, and bought a house in just the five years I've been working at the company myself, so a lot of life events can happen in that time.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#163

Post by damnyou »

nickysielicki wrote: post #41
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #10

H1B rules are quite ridiculous (or more accurately, cruel). Do people here know that even this 60-day grace window was only put into place relatively recently by the Obama administration? Before that, you technically had to leave the country the day you were laid off. Never mind that you might have a house a family and might have been living here for more than a decade. You would officially be staying illegally if yo…

I fully support immigration reform and expedited citizenship for skilled workers. I empathize with you. I have a lot of friends from school who have to deal with this, and it sucks. On the other hand, the H1B system isn’t supposed to import fungible labor. These visa are supposed to be for highly specialized labor — highly specialized to the point that the openings are rare. It’s hard to fault an abused program for b…

This is simply not true. What you're talking about is the intent of the O-1 and EB-1 programs, not H-1B.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#164

Post by vsskanth »

nbaksalyar wrote: post #114
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #10

H1B rules are quite ridiculous (or more accurately, cruel). Do people here know that even this 60-day grace window was only put into place relatively recently by the Obama administration? Before that, you technically had to leave the country the day you were laid off. Never mind that you might have a house a family and might have been living here for more than a decade. You would officially be staying illegally if yo…

> Before that, you technically had to leave the country the day you were laid off Interestingly enough, there's a very similar system in place in the United Kingdom (Tier 2 General). Not only you have to leave within 60 days after being laid off, but there's also a "cooling-off period" of 1 year, which means that you can't get a new visa during this period and effectively it resets your time until permanent residence…

UK doesn't have "at-will" employment like the USA.

Their PR system is also time based, which means you don't have to live in uncertainty forever, unlike the H1B which is lifelong temporary immigrant for certain nationalities.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#165

Post by damnyou »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #17
dccoolgai wrote: post #12

These are all great tips. It is a really well-written article with great advice. I just come away from this with a crushing sense of depression driven by the following thoughts: I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. 60 days or get out. This absolutely effects every engineer. Even the most racist ones: that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed…

> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this. Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were no…

The "US Tech Workers" "union" is actually a front for the John Tanton white nationalist network. It is not an actual union.

It is true that some other unions like the AFL-CIO have historically opposed immigration on these grounds, though.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#166

Post by drinchev »

Probably my 1 year old daughter talks right now, but I really have no time to do stuff on the weekend. I'm happily not living with a visa though, but still I think if you don't have enough time, you can always "spend" some career achievements and go to a less paid gig. When the market recovers your career will recover too.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#167

Post by moises_silva »

CountSessine wrote: post #110
nrmitchi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people here know that even this 60-day grace window was only put into place relatively recently by the Obama administration? My worst situation dealing with this was a TN status rather than an H1B, where I was told at a border that I could be ineligible for admission to the US because I had no left the day that I was laid off from a previous position. I had to tell the CBP officer that there was a 60 day grace p…

Yeah this is pretty close to my experience. I had a job offer from a US company. I would have been setting down roots in the US - my kids would have been in a US school, my wife would have been giving up her job. We would have been buying a house. But all of that could have been swept away in the course of a periodic half hour meeting with a border patrol agent to renew my TN status. My whole life would be pulled up…

I agree. I think you made the right call. We live in Canada (Ontario). We wanted to move to SF to be closer to family (Mexico) but in the end, even with a FAANG job offer, it was too risky and the current political climate doesn't seem friendly to immigration (even legally). Quite more so for someone from Mexico.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#168

Post by damnyou »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #19
mancerayder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Typically it's the Democrats who are pro-immigration, but in reality they don't care much about H1B style immigration and are in fact likely against it due to American tech unions hating H1Bs, Wait, what? Tech unions? I've never seen a single union in my entire 20 year career. I was sympathetic up until you complained about that. What unions? The H1B stuff goes back and forth politically. If you ask me, if the econ…

https://ustechworkers.com/ for example. I don't know what makes something 'officially' a labor union but at least they call themselves that. There was also Washington state Tech Workers Union.

That's a front for a network of white nationalist organizations, not an actual union.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#169

Post by H8crilA »

49yearsold wrote: post #157

This is mind boggling to see so much effort need to put into getting into FAANG. I am 49 years old and working as an engineering manager in a public company. I have spent decades writing large distributed, Saas, on-premise, enterprise application - many of which I helped implementing, architecting and supporting. Then I just went to leetcode and saw one of the "EASY" question about how to prepare for FB interview. It…

I mean, are you still writing any code? If not then those questions will look pretty damn difficult, as their objective is to filter for people that know how to write code (it's a high precision, lower recall filter, though). As an engineering manager you're probably not really writing any code on a regular basis. It's the same for expecienced managers in a BigCoolKnownCorp that I work for, I think they would have problems with an entry level whiteboarding code question.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#170

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

Lammy wrote: post #91
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this. Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were no…

It isn't about worker supply or wages. It's about workers' relative abilities to stand up for something (anything) versus having to keep one's head down and build whatever evil thing management wants built. As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.

It's no single thing because people's decisions are affected by the sum total of their life's balance sheet.

The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'.

As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for.

But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for.

This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.

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