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Laid Off, Now What?

bharathpbhat.github.io

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#331

Post by fakedang »

walamaking wrote: post #145
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…

It is scary to think about 1) how much control CBP officers have over the fates of people entering the country especially on non-citizen statuses, and 2) how little they know about the rules affecting the latter. E.g. I've heard of CBP officers not knowing that Canadians don't need to get a visa to enter the US. Also heard of CBP officers not knowing what "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" was on a student's F-1…

This America seems woefully similar to Iran, ngl

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#332

Post by Gibbon1 »

m0zg wrote: post #241
jdashg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democrats do not desire Hispanic immigration because they're likely to vote democrat. It's convenient but not all convenient things are causal. By and large Democrats prioritize the most disadvantaged first, and that's poor immigrants, many of whom happen to be coming across from Mexico.

> the most disadvantaged first How about prioritizing the most disadvantaged _US citizens_ first instead of kicking the stool from underneath them by importing cheap labor?

My dad talks about helping Mexicans pick cotton on his grandfathers farm in Central California. One reason my dad tried to do well as he could in school.

I'm less worried about Mexicans spilling over into California than I am about jobs being off shored to the far east. Clinton lost in 2016 because she and Bill Clinton are poster childs for NAFTA and letting China into the world trade organization.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#333

Post by [deleted] »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #123
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…

I grew up with a dad working for 70-120k and a mom at home. I can’t even imagine how nice the lifestyles of Bay Area kids are.

[deleted]

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#334

Post by m0zg »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #332
m0zg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most disadvantaged first How about prioritizing the most disadvantaged _US citizens_ first instead of kicking the stool from underneath them by importing cheap labor?

My dad talks about helping Mexicans pick cotton on his grandfathers farm in Central California. One reason my dad tried to do well as he could in school. I'm less worried about Mexicans spilling over into California than I am about jobs being off shored to the far east. Clinton lost in 2016 because she and Bill Clinton are poster childs for NAFTA and letting China into the world trade organization.

You should be worried about Mexicans. Even today a lot of CA schools are majority-Hispanic. If migration continues at the present rate, the United States will lose sovereignty by the end of the century at the latest. Read "Flashpoints" by George Friedman, he explains really well what's going to happen. 50-75 million foreign nationals in the country who can also vote in Mexican elections is not a good scenario to pursue in the long term, even if you want some tactical electoral gains. Globalists don't really give a shit, but you, with your very much localized wealth, should.

Then there are also the working poor (and _especially_ black working poor) facing stiff wage competition from Mexicans willing to work without worker protections and for a lower wage than would be sustainable for an American. What are those people supposed to do? Live off welfare? Who will pay for the welfare? Me? Why?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#335

Post by TeaDrunk »

sushshshsh wrote: post #309
TeaDrunk wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh okay, I was actually looking at citizenship. If you don’t care about being a citizen and just want to work, I can understand that’s an easier process.

Sorry for the lack of clarification. Citizenship would actually come relatively quickly after holding the green card as per normal. I suppose around 5 years is the normal waiting period? You just have to pass a simple test where you memorize key value pairs like "Who wrote the Star Spangled Banner?" "Francis Scott Key" However American citizenship is of extremely dubious worth, even if you really like to travel like…

5 years is imo really long to get citizenship if you’re working full time, paying taxes, etc.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#336

Post by mav3rick »

49yearsold wrote: post #173
H8crilA wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Correct - I don't write code 100% of my time but I do code reviews on daily basis, involved in architecture, design of new feature; implementing a side project using swift, xcode,java for personal finance app. But still I feel so clueless when I see these questions on leetcode or similar sites.

Do you not value the fundamental tenets of CS ? Is it beneath you to learn them ?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#337

Post by BossingAround »

nph5667 wrote: post #42

I find it quite amusing the efforts programmers have to put into a job interview. Especially comparing to what they will be doing every day at job if they are accepted. It's two separate worlds - job interview and job itself.

At times, I feel like job interview might be the most exciting problem solving an engineer might do for a company. After that, it's more of the same old "do this thing you've done 10 times but now in Go with go-routines."

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#338

Post by distant_hat »

stack_underflow wrote: post #207
titanomachy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be so bad if Indians and Chinese could actually immigrate. They have to stay in this precarious H1B state indefinitely, since getting a green card is effectively impossible for people from those countries.

Hell, I'm Canadian and I also bucket into the India group since I was born there. Doesn't seem to matter that I was less than a year old when my parents immigrated to Canada either. I don't have high hopes for ever receiving a green card: https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-...

yea, its more of a quirk of where you were born rather than nationality though both are almost often the same. I have an Indian friend who was born in Iran because his dad was working there when he was born. He lived in Iran less than a year but got his green card in less than 3 months.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#339

Post by toomanybeersies »

xtracto wrote: post #318
dudul wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this_array.sort() I hate stupid leetcode based interviews. It's like "gotcha journalism " just to have a justification for a subjective rejection It's like when as couple of weeks ago some random recruiter was interviewing me and asked "what's your weak point as a manager" ... I was sincere and if course the reason I was rejected is because they are looking for someone who doesn't have THAT exact weakness. GOTCHA!!

I feel that asking candidates negative questions gives you a better idea of a programmers aptitude than asking positive questions. Asking a candidate to give an example of a problem they couldn't solve, what they attempted when trying to solve it, and why they couldn't solve it, gives you an idea of their problem solving process and a real sense their upper limit of ability. Any candidate can gas themselves up and cherrypick some impressive achievements, or provide a laundry list of tools they have "experience" with.

Rejecting candidates based on their response to those types of questions is completely counter-productive. You'll just end up with a bunch of employees who are either liars, or very good at delegating blame. You want employees who take ownership of their work and assigned tasks.

As for programming tasks/questions in interviews. I think that it's important to test applicants' practical knowledge of sorting and other enumerable operations as it's a common task that's often done wrong, often with significant performance impacts. However, requiring a candidate to re-implement a common sorting algorithm for an array of numbers does nothing but stroke the interviewer's ego. The last time I actually had to write a sorting algorithm from scratch was in a 200-level computer science paper.

An actually sane interview question/task would be to ask the candidate to sort an array by an unconventional comparison, using a language's standard sorting functionality.

For example: sorting an array of coordinates by their absolute distance from (0, 0), or sorting an array of RGB colours by intensity. They're problems that a programmer would realistically encounter in a real-life application, and test that the candidate actually understands how to manipulate non-trivial enumerable/comparable data.

Asking candidates to implement quicksort selects for applicants who have a case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. You don't want to hire programmers who implement their own sorting algorithms from scratch, there's a >90% chances they'll implement it worse than the language's standard implementation, while wasting a bunch of time that could be spent solving actual business problems, and creating technical debt to boot.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#340

Post by triyambakam »

bradlys wrote: post #143
gcheong wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it had stopped at fizzbuzz as a quick check for whether you can meet the lowest bar for coding I think it would still have some merit but it just seems to have gotten out of hand to the point that ability to get a job now is completely decoupled from your prior experience.

It's an arms race. Big name employers only wanted the top 1% of candidates. A bunch of people wanted to get into the top 1% and figured out a way (leetcode, ctci, etc.). And then employers kept only wanting the top 1% - so they just raised the bar higher and higher. Now we're at the scale where if you haven't done a minimum of 200 problems before any interview round - you're not likely getting an offer from FAANG/etc…

Ctci?
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