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

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341–350 of 496 posts

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

#341
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree. Giving a neutral, business sounding label to something like this, and normalising it doesn't make it right. As an interaction between two individuals, this would be immediately recognised as morally wrong, even if contractually right. Isn't morality supposed to scale?

Theoretically it is; practically corporations are implicitly immoral - they’re not human, they have no feelings, it’s only left to whatever (HR in this case) procedures are in place to ensure a positive outcome. Such procedures tend to fail when you move fast and break things.

  > corporations are implicitly immoral
i think the word you are looking for is amoral?

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

#342
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relocation to US / Canada is usually primary reason why people look for offers like that. No amount of remote tools an offices abroad will ever replace option to move countries. I am immigrant myself who want to get to EU / US at some point so I can understand reasons of other people really well.

You're saying there aren't enough good Indian engineers who will agree to work for Meta from India? I highly doubt that's accurate.

Have you been to India? I genuinely love the place but if you want to live and work somewhere then (in general) you're not going to choose a country with poor infrastructure over places like the US or most of Europe unless you're feeling adventurous or have some specific reason to. So it's not a case of not being willing to work remotely but preferring to move.

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

#343
I sympathize but also people need to get a clue. This layoff didn't come out of nowhere like people are implying, it was strongly telegraphed in advance. On June 30 Zuckerberg said at an all hands "there are a lot of you that probably shouldn't be here". There were hiring freezes in place. The share price is down like 75% from peak. Stop being dumb sheep and learn to read the signs.

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

#344
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Meta problem, this is a USA workers rights problem.

> A software engineer from India says he was fired by Meta 2 days after he moved to Canada for his job

Okay, replace USA with Canada.

Same issue.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the Trump hate, irrational and all encompassing.

Why do you think the trump hate is irrational? What is the main rational points and reasons you like Trump? Or at least, think that he is being unfairly treated, since that does not require liking/agreeing with him.

There is rational people who disapprove or criticize Trump or Elon, but people who fall into the "hate" camp seem to have fallen for the loudest voices lacking reason or logic.

As a Canadian, I am not on either side, so I don't actually like or support Trump. Sometimes he is funny, sometimes his antics expose the folly of others, and sometimes he is a stupid brute.

As an outside observer, it is easy to see that Trump is not treated the same as others, and my observation is that pattern is being repeated with Elon.

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

#346
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically it is; practically corporations are implicitly immoral - they’re not human, they have no feelings, it’s only left to whatever (HR in this case) procedures are in place to ensure a positive outcome. Such procedures tend to fail when you move fast and break things.

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.

Corporations often engage in a sort of 'responsibility laundering'

Andrew in HR just does what the policy says, it's unfortunate but rules are rules, and the policy doesn't say this is any exception.

Barbra the CEO who set the policy would have made an exception if it had been brought to her attention, but it wasn't. The policy was set serving the interests of the shareholders.

Charles the shareholder is just an average member of the public and isn't party to any internal firing plans. And in any case, he owns 0.0000002% of facebook - far from a controlling interest.

And like magic, the responsibility has disappeared - vanished into the gap between Andrew and Barbra.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as you treat other people well and with compassion And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. That position is shit, though.

> And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". Yes. That's necessary too. Did you rather treat everybody as an undifferentiated fog? Compassion is not about bending over backwards for jerks. > It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. Even that is very defensible: you can be user-friendly for different groups with differe…

[flagged]

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

#348
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think there is nothing wrong with a company doing that? Ethically? Legally?

Why should there be anything 'wrong' with laying off someone who has just joined, whether they've relocated or not? When companies decide on large re-orgs, whole teams, departments, business unit can go. That's just the way it is. Relocating is no protection against being laid off, be it legally or ethically. Companies can show empathy and that they care by providing support, as said.

> That's just the way it is.

You're making an empirical claim to argue against something normative.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have zero clue of what you're talking about, don't shame yourself this bad in public.

Anything substantial you want to add?

I was dumb 20 years ago where I thought exactly like you. Also, this kind of thinking is generally coming from people with lack of self-confidence.

I've been on both sides of this, and I saw in the last 20 years and continue to see how this works. Now, I'm on the hiring side for the last 7 years, and there is no way this push down wages, in fact it is exactly the opposite, this pushes wages up. I prefer pay more to bring someone very good, than pay half to have someone semi competent. If I restrict my hiring locally, I'll mostly get low quality workers, the market is satured of low quality which will push wages down, the very good ones are very difficult to hire.

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

#350

So, I have some inside knowledge on this one. There were many people who were axed as part of the layoffs days after start. But these layoffs were planned for months. The thinking was either 1) we can rescind job offers and give them nothing or 2) at least give a severance package to people who expected employment. Now, I'm not excusing that there are cases like this that fall through the cracks. It really really suc…

> Given the level of secrecy and reality of a nearly 90k person company - it's highly doubtful that the people involved in the hiring process had any idea of the impending layoffs.

This is a reality of the world that many commentators on HN seems to miss on these layoff threads. The circle of knowledge on layoffs starts small, and stays small, and only expands slightly maybe a day or two before the event as you bring into the fold key personnel that might be needed to support the event.

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