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Laid Off, Now What?

bharathpbhat.github.io

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#181

Post by PragmaticPulp »

TrackerFF wrote: post #52
oDot wrote: post #7

The current state of job interviews is terrible. Just the fact that studying for a few weeks affects their outcome should raise eyebrows everywhere. And don't get me started on lack of job-related questions, false negatives and having to guess what interviewers want to hear

It seems to be a mostly US-centric thing. I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire. Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in term…

As a counterpoint, I had to intervene when I discovered one of our European offices was interviewing mobile developers with a 40-80 hour take home project. They were not happy when we made them reduce it to a 4-5 hour take home problem.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#182

Post by dccoolgai »

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…

Politically, it seems to be a big crappy case of playing the ends against the middle... The ends being: 1. All the shitty racists lobbying _against H1bs_ because "took er jerbs" on one side. 2. All the shitty FAANG capitalists lobbying _for_ it on the other because they want to keep engineering salaries controlled.

My quick bandaid bill would: 1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase. 2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first. 3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#183

Post by philjohn »

It's always good to have your ear to the ground about potential troubles in a company - this can be anything from an "all but essential travel freeze", to downgrading of snacks and other perks, or decisions that don't quite ring true/don't make sense.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#184

Post by PragmaticPulp »

TrackerFF wrote: post #102
lowiqengineer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture. That's probably because OP makes triple to quadruple your total compensation at minimum as an L5 ML Engineer at Google. https://www.levels.fyi/ Total: $356,119

Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US. And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live. Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. e…

Not really. Many people earn those salaries for 5-10 years and then move literally wherever they want to raise families.

It’s not hard to save a million or more on those salaries before you turn 30. That’s a lot of freedom.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#185

Post by User23 »

fishywang wrote: post #148
User23 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no mention of H-1B at all on the State Department page I linked you. Where are you getting this from? Sure some H-1B holders manage to later acquire an E visa, but nowhere is it stated to be a prerequisite. Exceptional individuals don't even need a US sponsor to apply.

Sure H1b is not a prerequisite technically. But say you are the employer, you want to sponsor this Indian person's E2 visa, but you need to wait for 11 years before they actually get the visa you sponsored and start to work for you. Now tell me how is H1b not a prerequisite in reality?

If it takes that long it's because the category you're in is heavily over-subscribed and at a relatively low skill level. Using H-1B to do an end run around that is common, but to call it a prerequisite is dishonest. Our immigration system has limits because we believe it is in our citizen's interest. This means not every foreign worker that wants to immigrate is going to get to. US law gives preference to exceptional individuals, because our law is for the benefit of our citizens and corporations, not foreign nationals.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#186

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

addicted wrote: post #95
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…

The whole argument that Democrats, who have voted for bills that help resolve H1B issues by vast majorities and Obama passed executive actions that among other things allowed H1B spouses to work, provided a grace period, and until Republicans sued and had it rolled back in court allowed for H1 B green cards to be filled from infilled green cards in other categories, don’t really care is a remarkably wrong statement,…

> and the other side doing pretty much all the can within the legal powers they have to improve the situation

Except they aren't. There is a clear 'caste' system when it comes to the immigration Democrats care about. Their primary focus is on immigration across the Mexican border (a lot of which is often technically or borderline 'illegal') which they want to make as legitimized as possible as the Hispanic community is a massive votebank for them. So we have all this noise about DACA and the like.

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of legal H1B pool is largely an afterthought for them because the Indian and Chinese community in America is not that politically assertive, plus the H1B types can't vote anyway, and are mostly concentrated in places like California / Washington so their friends etc would anyway vote Democrat so who cares.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#187

Post by PragmaticPulp »

simonkafan wrote: post #124

This sounds horrible to me. I mean, do you really want to spend your life having to deal with leetcode for several months every 2-3 years? Maybe some people find coding interviews and leetcode problems exciting, I find them tedious and want to avoid them. Not talking about the pressure to find a new job in 60 days. So no FAANG? Indeed. You only live once and can spend your time better.

If someone offered you a $100-200K bonus to complete LeetCode problems for a month, would you turn it down?

There’s a lot of anger about the process, but it’s really impossible to beat the effort vs. reward balance.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#188

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

bgorman wrote: post #149
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop pretending that's true? Like there are really jobs that are sooooo unique that NO Americans have the skills and only some foreign worker unicorns can fulfill them? H1Bs are just skilled worker visas, let's stop with the charade that they're anything else.

If you want to stop that charade, you need to admit that H1Bs are frequently abused and are used to depress the salaries of American workers.

There is a wide gap between the two extremes of "H1B is merely abuse" and "H1B is only for Nobel prize type savants".

Do you know there is no general work visa at all in America, whereby a skilled person can come based on their merit and work in the US?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#189

Post by DethNinja »

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…

Only thing those questions show is how irrational the software engineering companies have became in the USA. This does not bode well for their futures as well.

As an engineer who implemented/architected SaaS applications, I cannot take these questions seriously at all and I genuinely refuse to work for companies that ask leetcode.

Do these questions help me to find good/above average Junior Engineers? No. Do these questions help me to find good/above average Senior Engineers? No. Do these questions help me to find good/above average Managers? No. Do these questions help me filter people who cannot memorize algorithms/interview questions or spend enough time on them? Yes.

So where is the logical connection between leetcode problems and finding good/above average employees? As far as I can see there is none.

There is literally almost no connection between a candidate being capable of solving leetcode and being a good software engineer that is capable of controlling/reducing complexity of the engineered applications and working well with other team members.

More rational approach would be asking people architectural questions, even at the Junior level. I expect a good junior engineer would have already implement a small scale system at least as an final year thesis project, so they should be capable of handling questions related to engineering/architectural design.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#190

Post by contingencies »

saltybytes wrote: post #176
contingencies wrote: post #20

I had a commercial investment related visa in the US. Our mobile digital video company, in which I was basically #2 right under the CTO, was very successful and was acquired by HTC. Unfortunately, my position disappeared in the restructuring. I phoned up the immigration department and they said I had 10 days to get out of the country. This was 2011.

This. Happened to me as the agency I worked for got bought and pretty much everyone lost their job due to redundancy. I was CTO back then and I it hurt to see my team of engineers, creatives dissolve within a few days. Since I was unable to find another position in an instant (was on H1B) I took the offer of the purchasing agency to work as a database admin just to stay in the country. I took a huge pay cut and a sig…

Oh, on my visa category, which was employer-linked, finding another job wasn't allowed. To remain in the US I would have had to first leave, then find a new employer, then get a new visa, then fly back to start again. I decided to leave.
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