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Laid Off, Now What?

bharathpbhat.github.io

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#281

Post by corpMaverick »

jameshush wrote: post #233
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…

I feel your pain. I've had the _worst_ luck crossing the US border with a TN. And I'm a white male Canadian, you'd think the racial stereotypes would be in my favour. Many CBP works simply do not know the rules as you said. I've been pulled aside for 3+ hours. I've almost missed flights even though it's 110% legal for me to be here and work. I was pulled aside for not having an I-94 paper in my passport even though t…

> I feel your pain. I've had the _worst_ luck crossing the US border with a TN. And I'm a white male Canadian, you'd think the racial stereotypes would be in my favour

Yes, Non-white people are more likely to suffer from abuse from authority. But if the law doesn't offer strong protections for a non-white person, then no one is safe. And you can be abused by authority no matter how white you are. All it takes is a bad officer having a bad day. I have also spent a few hours in CBP because the officer didn't understand how I changed my visa status. You become an criminal until things are cleared out if you are lucky.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#282

Post by dudul »

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…

A decade? Have the rules changed over the past 10 years? When I was on an H1B the rule was that the visa was valid 3 years and could be renewed only once for another 3.

How would you buy a house on a H1B? No banks would issue a mortgage to a non-immigrant visa holder.

Two things can be true at the same time. Starting a "resident life" while on a temporary, non-immigrant visa doesn't sound like a great plan; and yes, this visa is horrendous and should be deeply reformed.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#283

Post by pandaman »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188
bgorman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You are correct that there is no geneneral non-immigrant work visa but there are general skilled immigrant visas (EB1A and EB2-NIW).

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#284

Post by dudul »

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…

I definitely went through a stupid interview process when I lived and worked in Sweden. "Name and define 5 design patterns", "sort this array", followed by the "personality test". Everyone was nice and all, and I got the job, but it was definitely on par with what I see now in the US.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#285

Post by dragonwriter »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188
bgorman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

There are a whole lot of (both immigrant and non-immigrant) work-related skill-based visas in the US immigration system. It's true there is no one generic such visa, but that's because the US immigration systems doesn't use a small number of broad visa types but a large number of hyperspecific ones.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#286

Post by pandaman »

dudul wrote: post #282
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…

A decade? Have the rules changed over the past 10 years? When I was on an H1B the rule was that the visa was valid 3 years and could be renewed only once for another 3. How would you buy a house on a H1B? No banks would issue a mortgage to a non-immigrant visa holder. Two things can be true at the same time. Starting a "resident life" while on a temporary, non-immigrant visa doesn't sound like a great plan; and yes,…

There is a loophole in AC21: if you have an approved I-140 then you can extend H-1B indefinitely in 3 year increments. The trick is that I-140, once approved for 6 months, cannot become unapproved via a USCIS memo. So there are now hundreds of thousdand H-1Bs with permanent I-140s getting infintie H-1B terms.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#287

Post by vmception »

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…

> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field.

These pressures are why I can barely bother landing a software role anymore.

I'm competing with people that have real pressure to study these algorithm brainteasers, switch into system architecture mode, and then switch into behavioral mode.

"Oh thats cute you spent 45 minutes a few times a week doing a brainteaser? I just did 600 of those in a month, and rehearsed what my quirky but culturally similar hobby is."

the what now?

This is out of control. Yes, I am competing with H1B's that have 60 days to figure it out, no, that doesn't make "immigrants" the problem, this is a symptom of a system broken in several ways, from public policy to tech private sector norms.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#288

Post by nullsense »

gcheong wrote: post #192
marcinzm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by t…

Sure but do people want to actually want to live in those places? My wife and I both live in SF and we were able to buy a house which would be impossible now, but I don’t think we’ve ever cleared more then 250K max combined in actual salary. Now with only one of us working which could drop to zero at any moment it seems a move to cash out our equity in the house and move to Europe is a more feasible option than stayi…

I live on the other side of the world and my wife and I barely clear $25k

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#289

Post by notxnphbk »

tdeck wrote: post #152
nbm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “US Tech Workers Union” doesn’t appear to be a union at all. It appears to be a subsidiary of the “Progressives For Immigration Reform” non-profit aimed fairly exclusively at the H-1b issue, and the only spokesperson I can see for it is the executive director of PFIR. So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.

Funny to see this pop up because I happen to know who is behind this cluster of sites (i.e. https://ustechworkers.com/ https://www.cfpup.org/ ) and it's basically one super right-wing guy and some wealthy donors. None of these is a real union or even a real community group. It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration. I always thought it was really shady.

> It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration

That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool.

Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#290

Post by TeaDrunk »

sushshshsh wrote: post #257
munk-a wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who married someone abroad - moving to them is a far simpler and cheaper process than having them move to you. You may be thinking of the loophole of getting married overseas (which does exist) but the government is pretty strict with the requirements around that. If you want to do thing legally and immigrate to the US then you'd better have a decade of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to throw a…

No I'm literally saying marry an american. My wife is from China and I'm from USA. Marrying her ended all of the H1B games overnight.

From what I can see this takes at least four forms, multiple years, and possibly a significant chunk of change to a lawyer. Could you explain the process more since google is telling me it looks like a pain in the ass?
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