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

businessinsider.com

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

#431

Post by piva00 »

chx wrote: post #255
johannes1234321 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you sell the majority of your earthly possessions Not only those. You give up being able to easily meet your family, friends, ... your favorite spot for hanging out is gone and you are in a completely different society, with other ways how things are done. And then in this case with just two days in you are probably still in some temporary housing. For staying you need to find a new job, quickly and a new apartment…

> with other ways how things are done. When I immigrated to Canada, online ordering was not as ubiquitous as it is now. I needed to ask someone in the elevator where to buy a laundry basket. I had no idea . Come to think of, how on earth would you know? They do not give you a "handbook to Canadian living" when you land on an IM-1 visa. Bookkeeper. Lawyer. Handyman. Figure all that out, again, as if those weren't hard…

When I immigrated to Sweden I jokingly said to my friends "I'm relearning how to be an adult".

Taxes, bank accounts, grocery stores, buying alcohol, going to the doctor's, and so and so forth. I had to learn how to do these things again.

If one never moved to a very different society there's no way to really empathise how deep these changes go, you uproot everything that was considered your life. The only thing you have left when moving 10000km away for a job is... The job itself.

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

#432

Post by bawolff »

Tao3300 wrote: post #407
bawolff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think that's true in canada. IANAL but i was under the impression that if you are fired you are still allowed to stay until your work permit expires. Its only usa that has the problem you describe.

Canada, so IANAB

Its canada not britian.

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

#433

Post by JKCalhoun »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #423
notacoward wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Basic human decency" might be the only gate worth keeping. Without that, harassers and trolls have more effective freedom of speech than their targets, and I for one find that unacceptable. See also: paradox of tolerance.

>paradox of tolerance. Great observation.

Agree.

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

#434

Post by compsciphd »

charcircuit wrote: post #20
compsciphd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which if there's a 1 year cliff, means he didn't have a vesting date then....

Meta does not do cliffs.

ok, didn't know that, though would he still have had a vest date then?

ex. lets say meta vests one per month on the 15th, and he starts on the 14th, would he normally have vested right away, or would he have had to wait to Dec 15th? (and can apply to whatever schedule you want, just picked a monthly one for example sake).

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

#435

Post by irae »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #19
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.

If you pay for somebody to relocate to you, you should be legally required to pay for them to relocate back as well. This should have broad political appeal for the obvious reasons.

I would agree ethically, but unfortunately this would open a hornets nest of small fraud and abuse. On a way smaller scale, here in Brazil, every single rule that was made to protect "too much" the employee is largely exploited and breaks the system.

Don't get me wrong. The case of working only 2 days after the move is an absolute nightmare. But it is the exception that needs to be dealt with, not the reason for a rule that is hard to enforce and easy to fraud.

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

#436

Post by irae »

sneak wrote: post #236
haspok wrote: post #126

I read a story on my LinkedIn feed about a lady who had it worse: she relocated to the US with her family a couple months ago on an L1 visa, before being fired from Meta. Because of this, she now has a few months to pack her belongings, because obviously the L1 is non-transferable, and even if she applies and wins on the H1-B lottery and finds a sponsor the earliest she could start working again is fall of next year.…

I think that treating the adversarial and anti-business (and, dare I say, inhumane) US immigration policies as simple facts of life is a mistake. These are not stone tablets carved by a god; these are policies that people presently living dreamed up and implemented. They were made and they can be unmade. Life isn’t unfair nearly as often as US immigration policies are unfair.

If there is no provision on L1 for early termination, then the rules of this particular type of visa are entirely broken and needs fixing. I understand the reason L1 exists, I actually lived in the US under L1 myself, but there is no excuse for a country to accept a worker they deemed necessary and acceptable to migrate, and then impose such a harsh rule for edge cases. If the person needs to be let go because somehow their own fault, it is fine. But layoffs are an example where the company is at fault and the employee is the victim - in this case the minimum the government should do is to offer a fair amount of time for the person to find another job.

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

#437

Post by mschuster91 »

hooby wrote: post #145
mschuster91 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze (in addition to other measures taken to try and avoid/reduce the impeding layoffs). Hiring freezes are an internally visible sign (which may lead to critical people jumping ship at the wrong time or uncontrolled ship-on-fire quittings that end up larger than the orig…

So, basically a Perverse Incentive [0] - a systemic problem. But the firings are externally visible as well - and it's also externally visible whether the firings occurred with or without a hiring freeze in place beforehand. And whether the number of people fired is larger - or smaller is visible as well (and after a hiring freeze and counter-measures it's always gonna be somewhat smaller). And one of those two optio…

> But the firings are externally visible as well - and it's also externally visible whether the firings occurred with or without a hiring freeze in place beforehand.

Yeah, the key thing that a company this size has to take care about is to announce the news to everyone - employees, media and investors - at the exact same time, so no one can claim that "insider trading" has taken place.

> And one of those two options signals greater unpredictability and volatility then the other - which to investors means higher risk, right?

Yes but no at the same time. The playing field is theoretically the same for every investor, which means that there is always a non-zero chance of a company announcing massive layoffs.

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

#438

Post by charcircuit »

compsciphd wrote: post #434
charcircuit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta does not do cliffs.

ok, didn't know that, though would he still have had a vest date then? ex. lets say meta vests one per month on the 15th, and he starts on the 14th, would he normally have vested right away, or would he have had to wait to Dec 15th? (and can apply to whatever schedule you want, just picked a monthly one for example sake).

I don't know enough about Meta to answer that.

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

#439

Post by zelphirkalt »

lnauta wrote: post #424
zelphirkalt wrote: post #170

Apparently Facebook (oh, wait, it is Meta now, how could I forget) cares about employees as human beings as little as it cares of its useds as human beings. Good to have these kind of things surface and brought to attention. Some counterweight against the rose-colored glasses, through which many people see Face...Meta. Working for FB/Meta is a questionable choice in itself, though.

Going on on the whole fb/meta thing, I was wondering why people don't do the same for Alphabet. Everyone still calls it Google. But for facebook, the name was dropped almost immediately. Isn't that strange?

Might be for historical reasons. Was Google first or Alphabet first there? Also because of time. In Internet terms it has been ages since Google became big. Little is heard about what Alphabet is actually doing, except being the parent company of Google. I couldn't name one thing.

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

#440

Post by RestlessMind »

BjoernKW wrote: post #377
robin_reala wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you don’t have any junior engineers?

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.

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