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Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

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Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#321

Post by BjoernKW »

oblio wrote: post #289
BjoernKW wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it's the environment that is broken. Hence, it's the environment that needs to be fixed. Having people relocate to another country, because your organization isn't able to fix its own internal problems, means you're simply outsourcing your own costs to your employees.

That's not how reality works, though. And except for a select few, most people can't bend reality.

George Bernard Shaw comes to mind here: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Reality being as it is, is no argument for not trying to be better or improve a situation:

Contrary to the Shaw quote above I’d say that simply resigning oneself to reality as it is and therefore precluding better approaches is the unreasonable choice.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#322

Post by [deleted] »

z9znz wrote: post #260
feet wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter which way you try and slice it, there's always a human at the end of the decision. A human made the policies, a human made the layoff decision, a human decides to enforce policy.

While this is true, it is utterly infeasible for a company with tens of thousands of employees to consider the individual employee in their decisions. They can perhaps consider actions which will result in large impacts to large numbers of employees (such as regulating the inflow a bit more to protect against sudden needs to dump 11,000 people). Hire fewer, more slowly, and they can then slowly and with more consider…

[deleted]

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#323

Post by luckylion »

oblio wrote: post #261
erlich wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is crazy entitlement. Three months salary in a tech job is more than most people make in a year. If you are moving overseas, maybe wait before selling all your stuff until you pass probation. This idea that you should be guaranteed three months is so backwards. You are on trial. Tell me anyone’s advice that goes “we should fire slow, hire fast”.

Ok, let's ignore the selling stuff. Your partner also quits their good job. That good job might not be available if you come back, congratulations, you're back at years of job hunting and job hopping to be where you were years before. In the new country maybe this was not a concern and the other partner who was just laid off had a great salary to cover. Your kids leave their good school. Now that school no longer acc…

> Your partner also quits their good job.

So you're going "all in", hoping for a giant reward (aka to make more in a year than the average Indian makes in their lifetime). It doesn't work out. That's part of the risk of going all in.

Or you don't go all in, you don't move your family immediately, and you have a much lower risk for the cost of paying for a flat in Canada and one in India for a few months until everything has settled and you're confident enough.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#324

Post by luckylion »

makeitdouble wrote: post #117
lynx23 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you advocate that employees from abroad should have some sort of default lay-off protection? Why do you think this is fair?

Would it be fair to you if _all_ employees had a default lay-off protection ? That would be for the best as well.

Once hired, you can never be fired. Great idea!

Enjoy companies never hiring anyone because they'll be completely unable to let them go.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#325

Post by rejectfinite »

ricardobeat wrote: post #293
rejectfinite wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so many people are okay coming into another country and wage dump because "its their right" to move halfway across the world to work in the USA or EU. See stuff like: https://www.thelocal.se/20070523/7387/ You can't have it both ways. ---- I guess this is just CBS being racist :) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-h-1b-visas-have-been-abused ... "But this week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that…

That link is paywalled. Can you explain a bit more?

Sorry, they must be doing random paywalls

http://archive.today/OST1s

Basically: - Greedy company wants to hire latvian workers for cheap. Latvian wages in Sweden. basically half of Swedish wages.

- Union strikes

- Union gets called racists and all kinds of shit

- Weird compromise is made that basically gives EU countries right to social wage dump

Basically Sweden is heavy unionized so when companies can just remove the deal it breaks down: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/videos-more-about-unionen-...

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#326

Post by achr2 »

I have watched this countless times in Canada. “Foreign worker visas” are tantamount to indentured servitude. Worse is that companies hire third parties making commissions on finding workers - whose very compensation depends on carefully neglecting to tell the recruits about local market conditions and the lack of safeguards. It is exploitation.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#327

Post by brigandish »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #4

My sympathies for the gentleman -- but out of curiosity: for cases like this, what "time duration" would be "not surprising"? Even if he had stayed on for one more month, that would have been as shocking as well. Two months? Three? My suspicion is that there's no time duration within which this wouldn't be an upsetting experience. Perhaps unless we're talking about like a year, which no company would do anyway.

Restating the Sorites paradox does not mean we're unable to see that being fired 2 days after relocation is worse than 2 years.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#328

Post by bluedino »

WeylandYutani wrote: post #9

This happens a lot in my country. Eastern Europeans on temporary contracts and company housing (and we use the word house very liberally it is usually just a bed) end up on the streets when fired. They don't get help from the government because no passport. The socialist welfare state cannot be extended to foreigners or it would run out of € and the temp agencies take no responsibility.

>> The socialist welfare state cannot be extended to foreigners or it would run out of €

Here's what's odd about the USA. I know people from India and Canada, who were here and their visa expired, and they couldn't get a job, so they have to leave.

I also know people from Mexico, who are here illegally/undocumented/whatever, and they don't leave. They stay for years.

Because you don't already have an expired visa, you can file taxes (and get a refund!), open a bank account, get a driver's license, etc. But if you were in the process of coming here legally, they have your number and you're done.

I mean, they have to leave just like the first example. But they don't.

Zero fucking sense.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#329

Post by JKCalhoun »

autotune wrote: post #49
anshumankmr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I,too, have been impacted by layoffs. I myself was at a "unicorn" startup in my country and couldn't continue there once the pandemic began. I didn't get a story about me personally either (that being said there was quite a lot of articles about the events that happened where I worked). That being said, its a little different for this guy cause a) as the parent commenter mentioned, the guy uprooted his life and moved…

And how many times has that happened in the past with nobody batting an eye about it? Why does it only matter now that it's at a META company?

I suspect some of the criticism you are getting in these comments is due to comments of yours that seem to point to the villain in this case as The Media for not, I guess, reporting all misguided layoffs.

Perhaps you are correct. Perhaps the solution to these heartless layoffs is to put a spotlight on each and every one of them in order to shame and embarrass the executives at all companies.

But I suspect many people see instead deflection — you are absolving Meta's management because The Media dropped the ball a long time ago.

Re: Meta fires a software engineer two days after he relocated from India to Canada

#330

Post by crazygringo »

mduggles wrote: post #66

I'm horrified by so many of the comments here that seem to lack even the most basic of human decency. Allow me to fill people in for those who have never uprooted your life and moved across the world for a job. It is a massive commitment on the part of the employee, where you sell the majority of your earthly possessions, property, cars, etc. Then you go through an immigration process which even if its handled by FAA…

I'm not reading the comments here the same way at all, as a "lack of even the most basic of human decency".

Rather, I'm seeing it more as just -- that's just life, what makes this particular case so special?

People move for jobs all the time (including internationally), and shit happens all the time (you get laid off, your significant other breaks up with you, a loved one passes away).

It would be one thing if Facebook was actively tricking him. But we all can assume it was just a normal hiring/transfer process that had been in motion for many months, and company-wide layoffs wound up hitting his team (which couldn't have been known months in advance), and so he was the victim of really bad timing. But not out of malice, and he's still presumably getting months of severance like everyone else, so he can go back to India with money and look for a new job, which he's presumably extremely qualified to do (having been hired by Facebook).

And heck, it's usually a lot better to get laid off after 2 days (living in a temporary apartment) than say 4 months (you've bought a house).

So is it a bunch of time and effort wasted? Of course. Does it suck? Of course. But people get laid off all the time through no fault of their own, and sometimes the timing is terrible. Which sucks. But does that make it HN front-page worthy? I think it's totally valid to say it's not -- but that doesn't mean you lack "even the most basic of human decency". It just means you don't think this is news. And that's OK.

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