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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

#441

Post by RestlessMind »

BjoernKW wrote: post #192
robin_reala wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that’s simply not true. At a most basic level, if you’re going to collaborate effectively as part of a team for a long period of time then you need to realistically be ± 3 time zones at most.

That's only true if you're working entirely or mostly synchronously, which might be an indicator of inherent anti-patterns in your work culture and processes, e.g., lots of meetings instead of written documentation.

It seems you are working in a very niche area where most of the work is entirely asynchronous. In my area of work (non-trivial software development), there is a wide consensus that some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis. My company has fully embraced remote work, is going through an economic down turn like many other "growth startups" and yet finds it necessary to mandate meeting hours where everyone has to be present or to organize offsites where people can meet and get to know each other in a better way.

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

#442

Post by Msurrow »

unethical_ban wrote: post #303
hnbad wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even simpler: make 3 months notice mandatory across the board. Or heck, even 30 days notice would be a start. Of course there's no way you can rely on a corporation to do this voluntarily and regulation is unlikely given who pays the bills. I wish there was a way to make this happen but I keep hearing software workers don't need unions because we already make so much money and the better ones have nothing to wor…

3 months notice, while retaining access to company networks and campus? I support "keeping them on the books" for purposes of visa and health insurance, for example, but there are legitimate security reasons to have people cut off quickly when they've been laid off or fired.

I've never been in the situation, but from what I gather then both things happen. Sometimes your are given notice (and pay) but access revoked. But its also my understanding that in many cases, maybe even most, the employee works in the 3 months. The employer may even be a bit more lax with time off so the employee can do interviews with other companies. I know in most cases the notice period is used for handing over projects/work to another employee at the company, so stuff doesn't just get dropped. I get the security aspect, but from my experience its just not something an employee usually does. Maybe some other Danes can pitch in with their experiences.

I think its b/c getting fired is bad ofc, but not bad like in the US. I mean we have universal basic income, free healthcare etc. So I just don't think people feel pressured in a way that drives them to exploit access even after a notice, or get mad at the company in the same way. I'm just speculating. Again, there are companies and positions in companies where its a no brainer that access is revoked for security reasons.

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

#443

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

gw98 wrote: post #428
dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis. Your colleague does appear to have done a lot of reflection and/or reading ( feel free to ask him to contact me if he finds the stuff on my profile of interest). Most people just think Hitler=evil as the sole contibuting factor to the holocast, but I say that it's people around him, who did not have the conscience or who…

Oh no he has. His grandparents were tortured to death by nazis. He’s been to Auschwitz. There are two types: the ignorant and the complicit. The complicit are who you have to worry about. It was seen as a means to an end and was without compassion or care of others just the personal gain of rank or power.

Ah, near first hand experience. Unfortunately that wisdom will be lost in another generation, and to even most contemporaries that did not experience it, it's just another story. History will repeats and teching history will not help.

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

#444

Post by BjoernKW »

RestlessMind wrote: post #440
BjoernKW wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question seems to imply that junior engineers require lots of synchronous, in-person meetings and handholding. Is there any proof that's truly the case? Or isn't that yet another one of those commonly accepted, yet rarely questioned truisms when it comes to - an often dysfunctional - work culture?

> Is there any proof that's truly the case? Not the OP but the proof is my own experience in both in-office and remote settings. And everyone is going to go by their own life experiences. If enough people think that remote setting sucks and that junior engineers, along with many other roles, are more effective in person, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that's not the case.

Well, there are entirely distributed, remote-first companies like Automattic, Zapier, GitLab, or Basecamp. I'm certain each of those also employs junior engineers.

Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case:

Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?

Or is it rather that the company in question itself has an underlying organizational problem?

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

#445

Post by spencerchubb »

kiliancs wrote: post #292
spencerchubb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying a human is at the end of this decision is like saying a gun is at the end of a decision to shoot. The company is going to do layoffs regardless. If you swap in another CEO for Mark, that's just giving the company a different weapon to do the deed.

I'm having trouble accepting this comment is not sarcastic. The fact that most CEOs or boards would behave the same way doesn't make it moral, and the whole point of this specific threat is whether morality can be applied to corporations.

I'm not being sarcastic at all. I'm not saying that Meta's actions are moral.

The comment above mine said "there's always a human at the end of the decision" implying that if Meta just had more ethical individuals, then Meta would make more ethical decisions. I am arguing that it doesn't matter whether the individuals have good or bad moral values, because the company values profit above all else.

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

#446

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

Veelox wrote: post #217
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I am assuming you haven't spent much time around the kind of people that didn't approve of the vaccine. Let me write out a string of thoughts that support saying empathy isn't a great core principle. At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put…

Objectively, the vaccine is extremely low risk, and the benefit is orders of magnitude larger than the risk for almost all groups.

I understand that some people have an irrational fear of the vaccine, and I can even try to empathize with them to that extent. However, it still is very difficult to understand the level of opposition to something which is so simple (just two painless injections, each taking seconds to administer) and so overwhelmingly positive (a 90+% reduction in the chance of serious disease, in exchange for a vanishingly small risk).

Public health messaging in the US was terrible, but US public health agencies were extremely cautious with the vaccines. If they hadn't cared about testing the vaccines, the vaccines could have been rolled out by mid-2020. After all, the vaccines were formulated all the way back in January 2020, pretty much as soon as the viral RNA sequence was published. I think it's sad that people have the impression that the vaccines were not thoroughly tested, because they were actually subjected to an extremely high level of scrutiny. They weren't approved until full-scale phase-3 trials with tens of thousands of participants had shown that the risk of severe side-effects was minuscule (i.e., as low as in other approved, safe vaccines).

The vaccine saved on the order of a million lives in the US. It's one of the most unambiguously positive things developed by humankind. That's why the strident opposition is so difficult to understand - it points to something very wrong in society.

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

#447

Post by BjoernKW »

RestlessMind wrote: post #441
BjoernKW wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you're working entirely or mostly synchronously, which might be an indicator of inherent anti-patterns in your work culture and processes, e.g., lots of meetings instead of written documentation.

It seems you are working in a very niche area where most of the work is entirely asynchronous. In my area of work (non-trivial software development), there is a wide consensus that some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis. My company has fully embraced remote work, is going through an economic down turn like many other "growth startups" and yet finds it necessary to mandate meeting hours where everyo…

> some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis

I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.

That said, poster child remote-first companies such as Basecamp, GitLab, or Zapier have their people gather a few times throughout the year, too, to allow them to get to know each other better. That's not a contradiction at all and something entirely different than mandating people move to specific location to work there the entire time.

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

#448

Post by FieryTransition »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #417
FieryTransition wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, one of the real big issues are the government enabling alot of these wars and the dependency of a large part of the economy on the military-industrial complex, the morals thereof and the corruptional influence of the entities which want to further gain through military-industrial means, or justify it as as necessary at this point wrt. the economy.

Meanwhile, the focus is on anything but the MIC. The MIC loves distractions. Trump Hating being one of their faves.

Sadly, this is true, distractions are a tool which have been well used as subterfuge. And the fourth pillar of democracy have been bought, and most of the rest just spew badly written clickbait. It's hard to have a good government when people are not well informed or educated, to see things more broadly, question things and relate them to historical events. The thing is, it's hard to question things if you don't have a good framework, which has to be more than just navel-gazing. Some only see what is immedietly in front of them, and feed into the emotional side of things as a distraction.

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

#449

Post by gw98 »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #443
gw98 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no he has. His grandparents were tortured to death by nazis. He’s been to Auschwitz. There are two types: the ignorant and the complicit. The complicit are who you have to worry about. It was seen as a means to an end and was without compassion or care of others just the personal gain of rank or power.

Ah, near first hand experience. Unfortunately that wisdom will be lost in another generation, and to even most contemporaries that did not experience it, it's just another story. History will repeats and teching history will not help.

Indeed. My mother actually said that only fresh blood keeps the thoughts of war at bay. She wasn't wrong. I really hate this about our culture.

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

#450

Post by paulcole »

mafuy wrote: post #359
yreg wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the treatment. If someone tortures me, then probably not. If someone hires me, I move to the other side of the world, they fire me in two days and pay me out a million dollars, then I would say it is very acceptable. Also, compensation might be more than money.

I don't think you appreciate how difficult it is to navigate in a foreign country with no help. You could well be given $100 million and end up on the street because you were unable to complete the move-in process on your own. It's not like you can wave with dollars bills to fix this.

I don’t think you appreciate how much money $100 million is. You can literally wave massive piles of dollar bills at nearly any problem and fix it. People have gotten away with murder for much less money. I think you can avoid homelessness with it as well. Even 1/100th that amount would solve a huge number of problems.
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