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Laid Off, Now What?

bharathpbhat.github.io

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#141

Post by maest »

firebaze wrote: post #97
jdsully wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not an act of omission, this is a result of compromise with factions that don’t want immigration at all. The fact it discourages people is a feature not a bug.

If you immigrate, you emigrate. If you successfully immigrate (let's say in the U.S.), you have skills sought there. Those skills are probably also in demand in your origin country. You'd stand even more of a chance to be one of a few in your home country, gaining status, gaining visibility, turning the tide. I know I'll probably be flagged for this question, but still: why do this? Why not help your origin country w…

> Those skills are probably also in demand in your origin country.

That's not guaranteed to be true. Take finance - if you want a career in this field there's only a handful of cities where it makes sense to live and work: London, Singapore, New York, maybe Tokyo.

An exotic derivatives quant won't find much demand for their skills in, say, Almaty.

Similarly, tech workers benefit from being in tech hubs (SV being one example). Oil engineers need to be around oil rigs and so on.

Moreover, standards of living are different in different parts of the world. Levels of corruption, infrastructure development, civic engagement etc are much worse in some places than others. You may have had the foresight of choosing to be born in a well developed country, but many have not.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#142

Post by stepbeek »

nrmitchi wrote: post #32
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…

> 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…

Man, I brought a few Cuban cigars into the US in 2018 and the border agent tore me a new one. Even my confused “But this is legal now...” went unheard until I got through the line to the real customs agent who wondered why I was wasting his time.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#143

Post by bradlys »

gcheong wrote: post #45
lordnacho wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad, but compared to other industries there are some real pluses. At least you can actually hunker down and do these silly tests. There's a huge amount of advice on the technical stuff. And yes it means people who have a job already are disadvantaged, but that also means people who have no income have a way in. In a lot of other industries, there's no real way to boost your game. Often it's purely reputation of…

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.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#144

Post by maest »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #51
nickysielicki wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully support immigration reform and expedited citizenship for skilled workers. I empathize with you. I have a lot of friends from school who have to deal with this, and it sucks. On the other hand, the H1B system isn’t supposed to import fungible labor. These visa are supposed to be for highly specialized labor — highly specialized to the point that the openings are rare. It’s hard to fault an abused program for b…

The nature of the H1B being tied to a single place of employment is ludicrous though. It enables a power dynamic where these workers are basically indentured servants. This dynamic is a detriment to both these workers and their native counterparts. Once an H1B is offered it should remain in place for some set time period, with procedures in place to address fraud either in the case of the company or employee.

> This dynamic is a detriment to both these workers and their native counterparts.

Yeah, but it's great for the large companies hiring them.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#145

Post by walamaking »

nrmitchi wrote: post #32
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…

> 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, and had to ask around to confirm that it was a legitimate school. And many more.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#146

Post by bgorman »

paxys wrote: post #25
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…

Every one of the numerous studies done in this area over the years has come to the clear conclusion that high-skilled immigration produces a net economic benefit to the country and its workers (here's a recent one - https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Impact-of-H-... ). Silicon Valley itself wouldn't exist had it not been openly attracting talent from all over the world, and the difficulty in getting visa…

The main problem with this idea is that high skilled labor is conflated with h1B labor. The H1B system is completely abused by big outsourcing companies like Infosys, HCL,TCS and Wipro. The proof of this abuse is that the average salary from these workers is much lower from non-outsourced H1Bs e.g. microsoft workers on H1Bs.

For example, a few years Disney theme parks laid off all of their IT staff and immediately replaced them with HCL H1B workers for lower cost. Clearly in this case H1Bs were abused to lower salaries of American workers by bringing in low skill (defined by salary) labor.

Immigration isn't inherently bad but the H1B program is deeply flawed (allocations by country, dominance by outsourcing companies, workers being tied to employers)

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#147

Post by nrmitchi »

vecinu wrote: post #119
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 went through something similar but remember the name of the game is to not volunteer unnecessary information. Did you tell the agent you didn't leave after you were laid off? Or did you just ask for a new TN once you had a new offer? It seemed to me like being too truthful could hurt your chances more than to just ask for a new visa and let them process the TN as needed. Some employers wouldn't even report your ter…

Your point about not offering unnecessary information is, unfortunately, good advice.

In my situation it felt as if the officer was going to every possible length to find a reason to reject my application.

I was explicitly asked why I was no longer with my former employer, what my last day of work was, and what date I had previously left the US to return to Canada. Being untruthful about any of these easily-verifiable points would have been much worse in the long run (since this officer definitely seemed intent on running down every possibility). Honestly I am lucky that I had a proof of my severance agreement, which showed it was not a voluntary departure.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#148

Post by fishywang »

User23 wrote: post #135
fishywang wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the exactly same thing I said: you need to be on H1b (or other non-immigrant visa but allows dual-intention, for example L1) and wait for maybe years or decades (based on your birth country) to get that. Here's the current queue size: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v... . For immigrants born in mainland China, E2's current queue is 4.5 years, for immigrants born in India E2's curren…

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?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#149

Post by bgorman »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #106
calvinmorrison wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a H1B visa literally for a single job that's not able to be filled? It's not a work permit for working any specialist job, companies need to justify the need specifically

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.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#150

Post by abnercoimbre »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #122
TrackerFF wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cost of healthcare is minimal at Google. And yeah, you can easily afford a mansion if you want to commute long enough. 300k to 500k is enough for nice housing - unfortunately, as someone making $150k at 24 I’ll never have this American dream.

This is a rather damning statement and it saddens me that wealth keeps concentrating in such small pockets of America.

I'm in Seattle but I have engineer friends in Florida making your salary and they definitely have nice houses.

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