> Immigration support: We will set the termination date for March 1, 2023, giving those with visa applications (and a desire to stay in the US) as much time as possible to find a new job.
While I'm sure no one will care to enforce it, such an arrangement still puts you in violation of your visa status. If you aren't working full time and don't even have network access, you are out of H-1B eligibility, regardless of whether you are on someone's payroll or not.
Pretty right. In the HFT world, we have people going on non-competes all the time. During that time, most firms do not pull their visa petition from USCIS, pay continues every two weeks and the employee is still technically an employee of the firm, just that they're on garden leave. This is done by firms so that the employees do not have to leave the US during their non-compete.
They're not doing any work, so technically still counts as a visa status violation.
A lot of the stuff in trading firms is proprietary and pretty secretive like trading strategies, how their systems achieve some level of latency, if they have FPGA/HW teams then what are their capabilities like.
When an employee resigns to go to another trading firm, to ensure that they don't leave right away and use the secret sauce at their new firm, they put that employee on a non-compete or a garden leave. Basically, for a period of time, could be as little as 2-3 months to 2 years, that employee can either sit at home or go work in an industry that is not trading but for that duration they cannot work in the same industry. The logic is that strategies and systems change pretty frequently, so in that time whatever knowledge that employee has, becomes outdated.
If they decide to sit at home, to make it lucrative, most firms will pay their base salary for that period, or some percentage of total comp (base+bonus). Since the employee is getting paid to do nothing, almost nobody in trading has any issues with non-competes.
While this is pretty awesome, it is a pain in the butt for a visa holder making such a transition. Technically, to remain in status a visa worker has to also be performing the duties on their petition, so even if they get paid during non-compete it can lead for them to leave the US. Since this is not as simple to enforce and not rigorously checked, their previous employer does not revoke their petition till they start at their new firm. Since the workers petition is still active with USCIS, they're getting paid and have benefits still active, it just appears that the employee is still working.
> Since the employee is getting paid to do nothing, almost nobody in trading has any issues with non-competes.
That's surprising to me, I assume these are mostly ambitious people who would not want the gap in their work record that came from spending a year being paid to do nothing. Obviously there are other things one could do, but they probably don't advance the career the same way a year of real work does
In some lines of work, it is only possible to get hired by signing a non-compete. As long as such garden-leave practice is industry-standard, it may not be a career problem.
Furthermore, if you're in ambitious-mode, you can take that entire year to get better at your discipline of choice, paid for by your "ex"-employer.
It seems odd to conflate a gapless resume with ambition, desire to work, or even constant work with career advancement or career advancement with generalized ambition. The people I know that manage to maintain long gapless work histories aren't the most ambitious, and they often work harder than the people who've seen more career advancement. The people I think of as the most ambitious might not even have careers, but some do.
But that might be unrelated, and I think you're perhaps referring to people who specifically have the ambition to climb a career ladder and I've definitely found resume gaps to not help in that pursuit, but I don't think people with unsuperficial career ambition care so much about gaps.
I think career ambition is somewhat mundane, and within the parameters that a given person can control, runs its useful course with limited categorically different positive lifestyle impact. Limited in the sense that often times you end up just working on different products, or moving into a higher level decision making role, or making more money to do more programming or sales or whatever. The parameters that one can control being the stuff outside of getting extremely lucky while more or less doing the stuff you'd be doing anyway. For example, I could set my sights very high and end up at Google working on whatever. I'll make more money, but it'll go right into my bank account or on some fancy product. It's certainly more glamorous I guess, maybe the code is trickier to write, or the outcome more interesting, and that's all great and something that might be worthwhile to shoot for, but it's not really that interesting or that unimaginable or that risky, except to one's personal life balance. I just have to work on particular skills and devote a certain amount of time, and then maybe I get it, or I don't. Same reason people working at Apple's new campus on whatever product probably don't think too much of it, they're just doing work day to day. It's compelling and it's ambitious if you're not already there, and interesting, but it doesn't cross my mind when thinking of the most ambitious people.
The most ambition I see, represents seeking a categorically unlikelihood, usually one that is rewarding in a wildly extreme or different way (which could be career oriented for sure), that is potentially life threatening or otherwise actually risky, in a categorically different discipline or environment, and repeatedly.
Admittedly many of the examples I can think of come out with with the possibility of professional notoriety, but it's not a fundamental component. A popular example would be Alex Honnold, but he'd still be missing horizontal leaps, which may still come. Someone else set their sights on becoming the best BMX rider, then bike company founder, and then quit to become a custom furniture designer; the first being extremely costly and risky in a number of ways, with rewards being ambiguous at best and with no linear trajectory, the second being more obvious but requiring different skills that you'd need to build from scratch, and the third being a fundamentally different thing that's rather unlikely for someone to become successful in starting from zero.
The most ambitious I know though have no clear career at all, and do that sort of stuff even though there's no obvious notoriety, tangible monetary reward, or glamour to be had. That, or the extreme unlikelihood in successfully getting out of extreme poverty with no connections or skills, and then trying to do it again with something unrelated.
I.E become extremely good at skateboarding -> then a pilot -> then a mountaineer, and all the while you're just doing some arbitrary thing for money.
A career (and life) trajectory of the sorts that you described is ideal for people that don't much care about their social standing in terms of what is "expected" of them. As in you wouldn't expect those people to be head girls, they wouldn't much care about what was expected of them. The primary impetus for most success is ego and envy, and almost never bragging rights. The people who do things BECAUSE those things happen to be the best they could do are vanishingly rare.
Someone like Alex Honnold would fare very poorly in an office environment, and would get chewed up by the sociopaths-in-charge, and the regular office drone monotony would not respond well to someone like him joining a clique / group / "being the [X] guy"
There are many organizational explanations for this, but one that's sort of easy to understand without much background (ie sans MBTI / ways people respond to culture/novel things / esoteric woo / etc) is https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Most "ambitious" people care about their careers because they aren't properly ambitious in the first place.
Yes, I agree with every point you made and I'm glad you liked my extremely long reply :) It was a somewhat tricky thing to articulate while also not dismissing the merit of having career ambitions as their own useful thing.
If they're going to stick in trading then that doesn't matter because non-competes are standard in the industry, so everyone will understand. Some take it as a way to get some paid downtime. A friend of mine, who joined my firm, went around Europe on his 4-month non-compete. Others do something like that, if it is too long then they just work in tech.
Some firms like Jane Street and Old Mission have no non-competes.
This happens all the time. We won't know until someone tries to push the limit.
Some more similar examples:
- Green card holders can't leave the country more than 6 months. Many have stayed outside of US for 6 months with no issue. One of green cards' goal is for you to settle in US as home country. So, the general consensus is that, in a year, if you stay outside of US more than 6 months, then US is not really a home.
- RSU expiring in 7 years in order to avoid upfront tax. No one know why it is 7 years. Can it be 8 years?
- This layoff thing as well. H1B workers are on the payroll until 31 of March. Well, can it be 31 Dec 2023? Nobody knows. If you went to court, can you claim that this H1B worker respect the intention of the law? probably not.
sorry that's very lousy and irrelevant, nothing uncharted about what defines employment in immigration laws. Or that immigration cannot dictate how private companies hire people (can't have people on the payroll while doing nothing? Who tf are you to tell them?)
USCIS literally dictates how company uses H1B. OPT and H1B have to submit a document, signed by manager, explain their responsibility.
I'm pretty sure if that says "im doing nothing. I just get paid". They will be in trouble.
This case is uncharted because nobody knows how long on the payroll is wrong. We can all agree 2y is wrong. But 3 months, 4 months, 3 months 2 days? Nobody knows.
I gave you a few other examples where the lengths of periods are also arbitrary. One of them is even around immigration.
I don’t know anything about this, so I bet you are right (and hope you are!)
I do have to wonder if it would have been better to just not mention it, though. Could highlighting their (light, and well-intentioned) rule breaking invite enforcement?
I don't think agents are paid well enough to care this much about any particular company unless one of their higher ups told them to. And the higher ups aren't going to care about what will likely be less than 100 people, at least some of which will get jobs within 60 days, and who overall are not trying to game the system even if it's technically what they're doing.
In other words, I'm pretty sure they all have better things to do.
We are lucky that US is not ripe with corruptions. They either enforce it uniformly or they don't.
In some shady countries, you can bet that this would be enforced selectively.
It's sad that, for a company like Stripe that wants to do things by the book and/or needs to do things by the book (because they are in the financial sector), they will not extend employment date like this and will be criticized for it.
To no one's surprise, Stripe didn't offer this in the latest layoff.
I'm not without gripes about the immigration system in the US as my wife is European and we've been fighting to get her permanent residence established long enough that we've had two kids and moved three times, yet still we are in the struggle. However, the beauracracy is so complex that one's standing doesn't fall into the hands of any one particular USCIS officer. Such an assertion is incredibly disingenuous to how mundane, slow, beauracratic, and absurd the process really is.
What kind of bureaucracy are you facing? The biggest I've noticed is making sure everything is perfect on submittal so you don't get put into the exception handling path of approval. Common mistakes are wrong/missing forms, form entry error, missing/inconsistent supporting documents.
Sometimes its no fault of anybody, its just the length of the queue. E.g. green card renewals, simple, used to be done in 6 months or less. Now it is assumed that it will take 24 months. This i90 has no burden of proof or stuff, its just simple pay fee & get new card. So, sometimes applicant thinks rightfully they are stuck in there for ages, and USCIS has no saying in hiring new staff or implementing new laws or changes.
Maybe someone who knows queue theory could explain this, but if circumstances have driven the length from 6 to 24 months, doesn't that mean it's heading upwards to unlimited lengths?
In (basic) queue theory, at equilibrium (average input rate = average output rate), the length of the queue is proportional to the variance in the input rate. Make that what you want :D
How is this possible? My brother-in-laws wife is from Costa Rica and it took about 12 months to get her permanent residence. Have things changed that much in 4 years? Are you working with an immigration lawyer?
Have you tried contacting your senators and congressional representatives? They can sometimes kick in the right place to get a stuck bureaucracy moving again.
+1 on contacting your senator(s). I was
stuck in a bit of an immigration nightmare once and they helped get it fast tracked, connect me with the best attorney for my particular situation. Be sure to mention you’re married and have kids :)
> Pay + RSU vest: Anyone impacted will receive 17 weeks (13 weeks + 1 four-week lump sum severance pay) of compensation, as well as your February 2023 stock vest.
So basically, DoorDash is setting the termination date to align with when severance pay ends.
While US citizens can take their time and find another job while also receive unemployment benefits, someone on H1 visa has to technically leave the country as soon as possible.A laid off person on H1 cannot remain unemployed and continue to remain in the country. This is particularly hard on those with families, many living in this country for 10+ years, with school going kids. Many have been waiting for years to get a green card. This is a very kind gesture by the employer. Hope more employers do this.
As part of the LCA the employer must attest there is no strike or lockout, that the salary of similarly employed workers is not affected, & that the job application must be provided to workers already at the company.
So no, you can't just threaten to replace all your employees with H1-B visa holders.
Damn you are dense. It is on the employer to prove they are not affecting the wages of US legal residents as part of the LCA.
Bringing in foreign labor to a market implicitly lowers the wages of those workers. That is how markets work. Thus, there must be absolutely 0 residents already capable of performing the job. Otherwise the LCA is fraudulent. The only other possibility would be the employer is bringing in foreign labor to pay them a premium over legal residents. Which obviously no one does.
This advice is incongruent with that of any lawyer I have consulted on the subject (both from the perspective of an employer and as an employee). To those interested in the subject, you'll have a more accurate picture of the current legal climate from a lawyer. In my experience, it will be very different from this user's legal determination of whether one must prove the existence of 0 US residents for the job. As an employer, USCIS has never required this proof from us for a H-1B.
> It is on the employer to prove they are not affecting the wages of US legal residents as part of the LCA.
False. All that matters is that H1B workers are being paid over the prevailing wage.
> Bringing in foreign labor to a market implicitly lowers the wages of those workers.
False. Almost every study done on this has shown the opposite.
> That is how markets work.
False. That is how the first lecture in Econ 101 says markets work. The first lecture in Econ 101 isn't real.
> Thus, there must be absolutely 0 residents already capable of performing the job.
False.
> Otherwise the LCA is fraudulent.
False.
> The only other possibility would be the employer is bringing in foreign labor to pay them a premium over legal residents. Which obviously no one does.
False. Depends on the employer. You have to pay H1B employees more than the prevailing wage for the job. Many employers target 80th or even 90th+ percentile wages for everyone, including H1B workers.
> False. Depends on the employer. You have to pay H1B employees more than the prevailing wage for the job. Many employers target 80th or even 90th+ percentile wages for everyone, including H1B workers.
Technically not false, pretty obtuse though. Or are you claiming that e.g. software engineers/IT professionals on H1B visas are paid more than local with comparable skills/qualifications?
> Bringing in foreign labor to a market implicitly lowers the wages of those workers.
> False. That is how the first lecture in Econ 101 says markets work. The first lecture in Econ 101 isn't real.
You might try telling that J.Powell he probably never went past Econ 101 (if you listen what he says).
I'm saying that people on H1B are paid more than the prevailing wage for a metropolitan region. Many employers pay all employees more than the prevailing wage for the metropolitan region.
Where has Powell said anything about immigration, especially the sort of skilled immigration that H1Bs are issued for, and the labor market?
> Where has Powell said anything about immigration
He did mention that lack of labor supply is driving up wages.
> people on H1B are paid more than the prevailing wage for a metropolitan region
Because H1B visas are generally only issued to high skilled professionals? Sure. a software engineer on H1B is probably gonna earn more than the waiter or cashier in the shop downstairs. Are they gonna earn more than their colleagues who are citizens/permanent residents? Obviously not...
Regarding "Thus, there must be absolutely 0 residents already capable of performing the job.", I think on paper it's true but the burden on the employer to prove that there are absolutely 0 residents already capable of performing the job is really low: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/20/656.17
(e)(1)(i) Mandatory steps. Two of the steps, a job order and two print advertisements, are mandatory for all applications involving professional occupations, except applications for college or university teachers selected in a competitive selection and recruitment process as provided in § 656.18. The mandatory recruitment steps must be conducted at least 30 days, but no more than 180 days, before the filing of the application.
(A) Job order. [...]
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals. [...]
(e)(1)(ii) Additional recruitment steps. The employer must select three additional recruitment steps from the alternatives listed in paragraphs (e)(1)(ii)(A)-(J) of this section. Only one of the additional steps may consist solely of activity that took place within 30 days of the filing of the application. None of the steps may have taken place more than 180 days prior to filing the application.
(A) Job fairs. [...]
(B) Employer's Web site. [...]
(C) Job search Web site other than the employer's. [...]
(D) On-campus recruiting. [...]
(E) Trade or professional organizations. [...]
(F) Private employment firms. [...]
(G) Employee referral program with incentives. [...]
(H) Campus placement offices. [...]
(I) Local and ethnic newspapers. [...]
(J) Radio and television advertisements. [...]
What is discrimination by national origin is the fact that employment-based green cards have a quota by country of birth, without any adjustment for the country's population. However, the American legal system accepts that kind of discrimination by national origin, because it doesn't fall under the Civil Rights Act.
How? You get severance until March the only difference between US and non-US employees is the technically the date that employment ends. Everyone is paid through March anyway.
It doesn't mean they are paid until then... it just says your last day as an employee is that date, giving them time to look for other jobs.
Don't confuse it with being paid to do nothing because that isn't the case.
This "benefit" is available to everyone laid off. It's not discriminatory just because some people don't need it. Otherwise offering free bicycle storage would be discriminatory to people who bus to work, and offering free bus passes would be discriminatory to cyclists.
Something I wanted to discuss - the bandwagon effect.
If you want to do layoffs you will be best suited doing them at the same time as all the other companies. That’s because normally layoffs bust morale and lead not only to the ejection of the people you wanted gone, but also to the departure of the people you wanted to stay. However when everyone is doing layoffs at the same time there is nowhere for your good employees to go.
I'd say there is an effect, but there are compound issues at hand. Another issue is that it's just damn hard to raise money right now either through debt or issuing stocks. Someone very close to me just got laid off at Volta because they were in an expansionist mindset but you need easy money to pull that off.
Easy money is gone. Companies that balanced their budget without the need for debt to continue to operate are OK.
I am very lucky to work for a company that has zero debt. If I was looking to change jobs right now that would be one of the primary questions I would ask, the debt position of the company.
Many companies are going to get hit hard when their corporate loans come due over the next 1-3 years.
I’m trying to tease apart the bandwagon effect from the fundamentals you’re describing.
The reason why the distinction is important is that the bandwagon effect will come and go, while the fundamentals can stay negative for any amount of time.
Layoffs always happen, but I imagine it is like a wave. Sometimes you have very few, other times you have a lot.
"nowhere else to go" isn't really a thing right now - but "the mood is right" is probably more of what is happening. Employees are at least a little on edge (which significantly impacts performance, for what it is worth) right now.
Most companies that are laying off people do not need to lay them off. Their survival is not at stake.
Doordash, for example, is making something like 4billion $ of gross profit a year.
That's enough to pay all of these 1200 employees $3m a year, with some left over.
Like most growth-phase startups from SV, Doordash are not profitable at the moment and have no profit to speak of with an EPS of _negative_ $2.41. Please correct your "$700m in gross profit a quarter" to "$1.7b in revenue a quarter" or "$296m in net loss a quarter" [1].
"Gross profit" as seen on financial sheet doesn't work the way you might think it does, particularly for services companies. A positive gross profit doesn't imply a positive net income (i.e. that the company as a whole is making money instead of losing it). E.g. if you look at page 10 of that document you can see their total costs far exceed their total revenue it's just not all those costs are associated with making the revenue. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-are-dif...
So while the 700M statement is true in financial speak it's not true in the way you're impyling it i.e. it's not profit leftover they could be paying out instead it's just a certain financial measure in a company that overall is losing money pretty hard. Likely feeding into this reduction of corporate headcount to be honest.
What do you base that on? As others have pointed out, DoorDash is losing money every quarter. These companies have experienced hyper growth in employee count while the economy is good. But they are still losing a lot of money every quarter. When the economy turns, that high burn rate quickly becomes a threat to their continued existence. I think most of these layoffs are essential and may still prove inadequate. DoorDash for instance is selling a non-essential service. When the economy tightens up, people stop spending on things like DoorDash.
I feel envious of these folks getting such a nice severance. It would be rather nice for me to be laid off with a great cash flow of money and take a long vacation.
Naturally my life is financially in order (no debt, no kids to support, no visa issues), so I recognize my privileged position, and I say this as a first generation US immigrant who went through many precarious visas including H1B. Envy was nonetheless the first emotion the article evoked in me.
> I feel envious of these folks getting such a nice severance. It would be rather nice for me to be laid off with a great cash flow of money and take a long vacation.
I can tell you've never been laid off before, because even with severance it doesn't feel like a "long vacation".
Layoffs like this are heavily correlated with a collapsing job market. Finding a new job right now is orders of magnitude more difficult than finding a job a year ago. Getting laid off also works against you, as many potential hirers assume that laid off people were among the lowest performers of their company. It's not fair, but it happens.
It's also not really a relaxing vacation when you're busy prepping for interviews, dealing with interview calls and/or flights randomly scattered across the week, and other interview-related stresses. The clock is ticking and your full time job is now to interview to get a job. It's also likely (in this market anyway) that any company you interview with would prefer that you start ASAP, so you don't even have a defined end date.
Getting laid off with severance sounds fun until it happens and you're faced with the realities, especially in the middle of a collapsing hiring market that has been flooded with 100,000+ laid off FAANG engineers competing for every great job out there.
It depends entirely on your life circumstances. It can feel like a vacation if your partner is still earning 6x+ the median national household income, you have ample savings and multiple years of runway for any immediate debts that can't become delinquent without significant consequences, and you have wealthy parents to fall back on on top of everything else.
(for the record, I don't have any of these aside from the runway, since I have no significant debts due to the lack of a mortgage)
> I can tell you've never been laid off before, because even with severance it doesn't feel like a "long vacation".
I've been laid off with no severance and it felt like vacation, so it might depends on your specific situation. It was my first job, in Germany, 70% of so of my salary guaranteed as unemployment benefits.
I didn't look for a job for like six months, I could have used the full 12 months as I was more than cash positive and still managed to save 40% of my income without changing my lifestyle, it took me two weeks to find a new one. That being said I'm not a "study for interview" kind of dude, life's too short to grind for that imho
It's capped at about €2000/month, but one thing making up the 30% there is that it's income tax-free, and your health insurance payments are a lot less (since they're income based).
> Isn't it the norm pretty much everywhere in the west ?
In my US state (Ohio), weekly benefits for those without dependents cap out at $530. That's about 19% of my current salary. It would be barely enough to cover my mortgage and utilities, but throw in the car (payment / gas / insurance), groceries, incidentals ... I'd be in trouble. (And unlike some of the forward-thinking individuals who've posted here, I don't have several years' worth of savings to rely on.)
Edit: and if, god forbid, I became disabled ... my government-provided benefits would be something like $150 a week. They may as well give me a kiss on the cheek for all the good that amount would do for me.
I was last laid off in 2015 by a large media company, we received only 1 month of severance. (Which was 1.5 months paychecks because they paid in arrears)
Severance and notice of small scale layoffs (company under 50) has no protection in most states. 8 person company offered no severance, but we had a pretty good sense it was coming a month away.
This is boring flamebait. We all know there are differences in employment contracts between different parts of the world. This comment adds nothing to that discussion but a useless insult.
That doesn't prove anything. Yes, people would rather live in the US than in India, China, or Mexico. In those places the floor is just as bad as the US, but the ceiling is way harder to reach. With a working class salary in the US you can support your entire family in Mexico. That's worth living in a shithole for.
The European immigrants have a plan B. Yes, the US sucks, but they're only here for the money and can go home anytime they want. Don't kid yourself, nobody chooses to live in the US because they think it's better than Europe.
Meh it's a bit more complex than that, once you remove people coming from third world country and people coming for the top 1% jobs you're not left with many people
The US has plenty of flaws but note the US has ~3x the number of EU immigrants than the EU has US immigrants (relative to population of originating countries).
Definitely not. This last couple of years Ohio really fucked a lot of people I know. The state would not respond to claims and their system would automatically close “old” claims. You couldn’t refile or reopen the claim after this happened. The phone system would play a 6 minute message and then hang up.
Taking the state to court for this while also trying to get a job would be difficult.
I think it really depends on your financial situation and how you want to spend your time. If they have been saving most of their salaries and have years of savings saved up, then maybe they are fine taking a 12 mo vacation before starting the interview grind. Perhaps there are some side projects they want to work on instead.
It’s not that great. I was laid off in late 2019 with about 4 months severance. I was constantly interviewing and networking. And then Covid lockdown hit near the end of my severance. At no time did I feel like I was on vacation.
Happened to me recently, it was actually a great vacation. I was out of work for a couple of months, spent most of my time doing leisure activities, turned down a number of offers, and ended up with about a 20% increase in compensation. I could have done it stressfully if I’d wanted to, but why? I would have had less fun, and almost certainly arrived at a worse outcome…
But the truth is that good jobs are going to be very competitive over the coming months. Many being laid off now are likely to end up accepting comp packages far below their previous comp. The doors are pretty much closed at the usual FAANG types
I can say anecdotally that I've already noticed an incredible easing of the difficulty in hiring (while maintaining a high bar)
Have you considered just quiting your job and waiting a few months before getting a new one?
Engineers are quite privleged. We make money hand over fist, more than enough that its pretty trivial to save up 6 months of expenses, and just quit, and do nothing for a couple months.
After all, there is no point in making money if you don't spend it, and one way of spending it is to just take a break from working for a little while. If a break is something you think would make you happy, you should do it.
If only humans (me) were rational beings. I will never walk away from a 7-figure salary + RSU compensation at FAANG, no matter how miserable it makes me feel. Them laying me off is sadly the only option.
It's sort of the same envy I feel when I see student loan forgiveness. I worked a ton (30+ hrs weekly) in college, and 40+ hrs during summer/winter break, to ensure I graduated college with no loans taken.
And now to see loan forgiveness for people who took far fewer sacrifices (especially lawyers/doctors, who make significantly more than me now) - it sort of reinforces that working hard is a sucker move, and definitely discourages me from doing such paths if I believe I can just get a bail out later.
The vast majority of debt for people under 125k/yr who qualify for the 10k relief is the interest, not principle. The forgiveness is then effectively for a tax in this case, not the actual loan, when you think of it like this.
The federal government designed the federal loan program to make them money, based on interest. It has panned out as a very stupid fucking idea, in retrospect, and has made millions of people debt slaves for years on end. They set themselves up for this, combined with stagnating wages, making everything a joke. Everybody wants to talk about bailouts and "work ethic" but seemingly forget the monetary policy was set and managed by the federal government over the past several decades. They could have done better policy if they didn't want a bunch of bullshit.
It has nothing to do with work ethic, at the end of the day. It was a policy decision from on high, and the snowball was set in motion probably long before you even went to school.
There's no "reliving" of the burden. It is transferred to others, including those who already paid their student loans once, and those who never went to college in the first place. That is, all taxpayers and holders of government debt.
If the money was clawed back from universities, that would be fine, since they were at the receiving end of the racket.
The government is also why we’re in this situation in the first place. Their fuckup, their bill.
At the end of the day, this debt forgiveness is a drop in the bucket compared to other things that the government does that my tax dollars get spent on that I would prefer it not be. If we’re truly worried about the cost here, there’s plenty of other things we could take that money from that I would happily support.
People interested in what taxpayer money is going towards really ought to google where the majority of it is spent (hint: it's not student debt relief)
If you went to school at a time where working any non-degree-required job is enough to pay for your college (like I did), you went at a time completely different than today. College is prohibitively expensive; loans are all but required. And if a lawyer or doctor earns less than $125k they can have the extra ten grand.
In addition to the income limits (that right-wing media LOVES to conveniently leave out when lashing out against loan forgiveness), the loan forgiveness was for only up to $10K.
I can assure you that lawyers/doctors have FARRRRRR more than that.
I worked about 30 hrs/week while going to school. I didn't take a summer break. I finished my BS in CS in 2014 with about $45K of student loan debt that I paid off in 6 years.
For me to get upset now about people having some of their loans forgiven seems weird to me. It reeks of "I suffered, so should you!" energy. It'd be like fighting against new treatments for a disease because a loved one died from said disease already.
If you're talking about the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan, I think you've been a bit misled about the "lawyers/doctors" part - you have to be making under $125k/yr ($250k/yr if filing as married) to qualify for forgiveness, and the vast majority of eligible loans are undergraduate, not graduate. So it would likely be extremely rare for well-paid doctors or lawyers to have their loans forgiven through this program - unless they were working in lower-paid positions (think rural doctor or public defender - arguably exactly the type of roles we should aim to encourage people into with programs like this!)
Thank you for this information! I did not know this caveat.
I completely agree, some folks drastically benefit from this (in a needed way), and I feel no envy or upset towards them. It looks like my thoughts were misguided.
I understand your frustration. The economy is a system of incentives; and if incentives are misaligned this will lead to mistrust and eventually chaos.
Student loans are predatory. Some people fell for it and some people avoided it. I think the question: Who is (or should be) bailing any of this; rather than making you whole or keep this system just because you are the one who figured it out.
Of course, it is the tax payers (the weakest and most easily accessible $$ thing) who will pay for this (either with taxes, government debt or money go brrrrr). This will further alienate these tax payers and lead to the eventual collapse of this economic system.
So I guess I started off trying to make you feel better about it but now you are going to feel worse (since not only you won't be getting the special treatment but you are also probably the one paying both the predators and the "less intelligent" people who took these loans).
> To be eligible for forgiveness, you must have federal student loans and earn less than $125,000 annually (or $250,000 per household). Borrowers who meet that criteria can get up to $10,000 in debt cancellation.
Do lawyers or doctors typically earn less than $125,000 or $250,000/household? If not, loan forgiveness does not impact them the way you think.
> Do lawyers or doctors typically earn less than $125,000 or $250,000/household?
One of my friend groups has a lot of young doctors and recent med school grads. They are all looking for the best ways to take advantage of this, including things like accelerating marriage timelines to be a "household" instead of individual so they can qualify under the limit. Starting salaries for family practice physicians, for example, can fit under that $250K limit.
I'm not opposed to loan forgiveness for certain people, but the $250K household limit without a gradual phaseout is a baffling move.
100% of "recent med school grads" make less than $125k. A brand new resident will be making $45-50k and the yearly bump is in the single-digit percentages.
> And now to see loan forgiveness for people who took far fewer sacrifices (especially lawyers/doctors, who make significantly more than me now) - it sort of reinforces that working hard is a sucker move,
Just a note for anyone else reading this, but you’re only eligible for the $10k forgiveness if you have government undergraduate loans, and you make less than $125k. Few high paid professionals will qualify, and graduate law school/med school can cost $200k+.
TLDR: probably still work hard. Welfare is for the needy, or corporations.
If it makes you feel better, there is very little chance of loan forgiveness being allowed, and it will likely be in grid-lock until GOP takes the presidency
in 2024 and kills it.
I really find these mea-culpas hard to take when I know even just a smidge more than they expect.
In this case, I did a Doordash technical screen three months ago during a job hunt. Recruiter painted a rosy picture of growth and outlook, slathered me in honey-words, etc. This was well into the downturn.
Normalcy bias is powerful and I can understand that some companies did not move fast enough to respond to the change in the weather, but I can also fault them for it, and find these apologies self-serving.
There are three comments to this post, and they are all along the lines of, "well of course they lied that's their job, you should know better."
Firstly, this isn't about me -- I was smart; I took a different option.
But this is about my industry, and so my sword must flash from its scabbard.
I know you're sick to death of the P-word, but do think of the privilege that would be required in order to take responsibility for the decision, i.e. in order for the decision to be made non-coercively.
Thinking it through, you'd need:
1. Local knowledge about the way the tech industry works (which I do, so guess which job I didn't take after looking over their figures)
2. Access to plausible alternatives
3. (most importantly) confidence in oneself and one's perceptions.
I've spent the past half-decade of my good fortune trying to help friends enter the industry from other careers (urban planning etc.) and it's this implicit-never-spoken-about shit that is the biggest barrier-to-entry.
You can either have diversity in your industry or you can have life-or-death decision things that 'everybody just knows,' except for the newcomers. Pick one.
P.S. also the stakes are much higher if you're offered a work visa and a relocation package to a country where you can only legally work for a single employer. And that employer, if they fsck off -- well; that's how you get people alone and stuck, strangers in a strange land, running out of money and hope.
Recruiters are salespeople. Toxic positivity, undue flattery, etc are all part of their toolbox. It's ultimately on the candidate to perform due diligence on the organization, like with any product.
I had a realtor point out issues with properties that I might never have thought to ask about. Now, maybe that was to steer me to other properties that he would make more money on, but they were real issues. It did serve to build a sense that he was not hiding information just to get a sale.
Were you expecting a recruiter to say "Yeah things aren't great. I expect layoffs in the next few months" .? If so that's honestly on you. They would get fired for saying that. Of course they are never going to
Well, sounds like an easy situation to find yourself committing fraud in as the recruiter. Getting a bonus and the recruit loosing a better/lasting chance might already suffice depending on how aware the recruiter was about the future of the company.
I personally wouldn’t fault the recruiters. The higher ups who set recruitment targets are to blame. If they recruited a person who got laid off a few months later, it suggests poor planning.
Americans generally won't appreciate how scary this can be for those on work visas, particularly when the chances of finding a new job have dropped drastically. Generally speaking, work visas and employment-based green cards are based on the premise that you were unable to fill the role with an American citizen or lawful permanent resident ("LPR"). That becomes tricky for sponsoring such a process if you recently laid people off. There are also more job applicants and it becomes harder to lawfully filter them out to justify your case.
For people born in India, regardless of current citizenship, this may end up terminate a wait for a green card that has been ongoing for 10-15 years, leaving them little choice but to leave the country.
The process is completely arbitrary and deliberately capricious. For example, USCIS randomly audits some percentage (estimated to be ~30%) of applications, ostensibly to stop people figuring out how to game the system (ie by figuring out what USCIS will flag for further review). Now that's fine in principle but the audit (at the time my application was in process) added an additional 18 months. Completely randomly. When the audit happened it simply passed. with no requests for evidence ("RFEs").
Another example: examiners aren't consistent. Your case will be assigned to an officer. That officer might be quick or slow. Two different officers may treat the same application different. For example, one may request a form you and your lawyer think unnecessary while another doesn't. If you proactively include it anyway, that too can lead to delays to explain why that form is in there.
Unfortunately immigrants are an easy political scapegoat and a non-voting one at that. No party seems inclined to truly address these problems. Or it comes up occasionally with a bad bill.
In 2004, PBS had a documentary called The New Americans. I can't really find a way to wtach it online. It follows immigrants from a number of different countries. One was an Indian man (and his family) who got laid off in the dot-com crash (and ultimately returned to India IIRC). I suspect there'll be many repetitions of this in the coming year.
This lack of certainty and security in your living situation can hang over your head for years, sometimes more than a decade. It's stressful and cruel.
> That becomes tricky for sponsoring such a process if you recently laid people off. There are also more job applicants and it becomes harder to lawfully filter them out to justify your case.
All correct. General recommendation is to wait at least six months. A friend got his case delayed for two years, due to constant layoffs in our area.
> for example, USCIS randomly audits some percentage (estimated to be ~30%) of applications, ostensibly to stop people figuring out how to game the system
Yeap. Got unlucky with that too. And apparently the audit did nothing, because not only very simple and irrelevant things were asked (like org charts for a non-managerial position). Then, when I got to the I-140 process they issued a NOIR (Notice of Intent to Revoke), asking for a document that was filed in the PERM. One would think that, if there was an issue, it would have been flagged back then.
What it did do was to delay the process by a lot. On top of the usual delays – plus delays until your company gets around to filing for your green card. Which they have zero incentive to do.
Most immigrants don't know all the details and all the rules that exist before they sign up. It's not due to lack of research, it's because some things are really obscure and don't come into play until you care about them. For example, H1B is restricted to _one income source_ (spouse can't work). However, there's an exception for purely "passive" income. Examples would be investments – as long as you don't trade frequently. What's "frequently"? Noone knows. Day trading is obviously out but you still can't be "too active".
You can also be a landlord. But you are not allowed to be involved in the day to day activities. For example, a faucet broke. You could go to Home Depot, grab a new one and install it, right? No, that would be a violation. You would have to pay someone else to do it. But wouldn't hiring a plumber be something that demands time, and thus you are "working"? No, apparently not.
Even _expectation of future income_ can run afoul of the rules (and you don't receive a booklet explaining that). For example: you spouse cannot work, but can they start working on a game, or iOS application, but not sell until they are authorized to work? No, they can't. They are considered to be "working" even if they are not getting any income right now.
So, if you are on H1B and your spouse has a career(but not in a field that's in high demand), they essentially have to kiss their career goodbye. There will be a massive gap in their resume in the best case.
Also, if you are from India (not my case, and it still took 7 years), given the current wait times, even if you bring your newborn to the US, there's a chance you won't get a green card by the time they turn 21. Which means they will have to leave as they are no longer considered to be your dependent. It doesn't matter that they have not known any other country and may not even speak the language.
Much more can be said about the whole thing. I would advise any wanna-be immigrants to talk to someone that's been through the process. Don't ask US citizens (unless they have naturalized and used the work visa path) because they will have no idea what the process is like.
It is hard for me to appreciate, because while this does not remove my empathy for those people, I do realize they understood the terms when they took the job.
It’s great that they have set a March 1 termination date for those on visas. And the severance and stock vesting are also reasonable. Not to mention the fact that health insurance continues for quite a bit longer and then goes into Cobra.
The verbiage is standard PR pap but the actual actions are quite very considerate.
However, what actual responsibility are the CEOs taking after hiring like crazy knowing fully well that the pandemic exuberance and stimulus wasn’t going to keep the recession away, only delay it? I’m sure competitive pressure was part of the reason for the overhiring but it’s still not the whole story.
In every HN thread about layoffs, there is some number of comments that are written as:
"It's good that the company paid [nearly unfathomable severance benefits], but what ACCOUNTABILITY is there?"
My brother in Christ, the accountability is that the company is paying unfathomable severance benefits, watching their stock price tank, and getting dragged in the public sphere.
Put it this way, if the company was wildly successful how much credit does the executive team take for itself? Now in a downturn, you take that much blame.
So if you took a huge bonus for all your leadership during the pandemic, I don't see why you shouldn't lose your job when your lack of leadership did the opposite. Either you were responsible or you weren't. You choose to "be in charge" only on the upside.
That's for the board to do. If they're taking their responsibility seriously and feel like the CEO is no longer capable. See also: AMC and Disney in the last 10 days.
If the CEO is taking responsibility upon himself for leading his company in such a poor way he has to fire large swaths of people then he should quit. He's the CHIEF, the buck stops with him. What, is he going to keep his job and then just be a better CEO next time? He gets to make a hundred million dollar mistake and keep his job?
I've seen peers fired for much less.
The real answer is he doesn't take responsibility for anything other than doing his job exactly as expected and prioritizing short term profits for stakeholders.
Either quit, because you're a bad CEO, or do away with this "I'm taking responsibility" facade. Just be upfront with it. "I fired you to make a quick buck." I can at least respect the honesty there.
Why not? Is it very difficult to countenance a founder who has 'got his' leaving to make way for someone who has a little more ethics? Every single one of these CEOs hired an untold number of people full-time during the pandemic, and then discarded them just a year or so after said binge. They knew the game they were playing, only they pretend to be paragons of virtue and write meaningless blather about it.
> However, what actual responsibility are the CEOs taking after hiring like crazy knowing fully well that the pandemic exuberance and stimulus wasn’t going to keep the recession away, only delay it? I’m sure competitive pressure was part of the reason for the overhiring but it’s still not the whole story.
Why do you think Doordash/Shopify/Stripe "knew full well" that this boom wouldn't last?
The common thinking in SV and the world as a whole was that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online services by about 5 years due to lockdowns and WFH. Unfortunately, the world reverted to the mean with regards to online shopping and ordering food pretty quickly in 2022, but this idea of accelerated-online was a reasonable one held by many.
Hell, if you looked at the numbers during those quarters at all these companies, the boards and shareholders would have fired the CEOs if they hadn't staffed up.
> Why do you think Doordash/Shopify/Stripe "knew full well" that this boom wouldn't last?
In the Doordash case, it's pretty god damn obvious the boom wouldn't last. DoorDash shot up because restaurant dining rooms were closed. As soon as restaurants started opening back up, it only makes sense that DoorDash's popularity would sink. While certainly some people will have decided "Hey, this is pretty convenient" and keep using them, I think it's absolutely bone-headed to think it wasn't going to eventually dip.
> Unfortunately, the world reverted to the mean with regards to online shopping and ordering food pretty quickly in 2022
Again, completely bone-headed to have not expected this to happen.
If you are so confident that it was bone-headed to not foresee this - did you take a short position against these companies in Q4 2021? If not, why? You would have made an absolute fortune placing trades against these public companies.
Here's a different way to look at it - a whole lot of people started using DD that would have never tried it during lockdowns. If those users liked the experience and convenience, then they'd stuck with it. DoorDash bet that a lot more people would stick around than actually did. DD was wrong, but I would argue that it wasn't a dumb bet given the stickiness of their product, and their excellence in execution up until that point.
What are they supposed to do? Demand ramped up significantly during covid - they needed staff to support it. They really had no choice but to hire that staff unless they wanted to have an undersupported platform with extremely long wait times for things like customer service or onboarding new restaurants. And with DD having a lot of competition (Uber Eats, Postmates, etc etc), someone else would pick up their slack and keep that business.
If I were a board member I wouldn’t really want an environment where CEOs were deathly afraid of making bets that made sense at the time. It just leads to stagnation.
What consequence do you think the CEO should face?
That is a fair point. However, my point is not that the CEO should face consequences, but voluntarily take responsibility in some meaningful way. "That's on me" in a corporate email != taking actual responsibility. The empty platitudes are the problem. The accommodations for employees who are being let go are above and beyond, which is the silver lining.
Your last paragraph is a little ridiculous. Hindsight is 20/20. If you knew there was a recession coming, why didn’t you short the market and become rich? Nobody, including CEOs, knew for certain when the pandemic would end or how that would affect the markets.
>Most of our investments are paying off, and while we’ve always been disciplined in how we have managed our business and operational metrics, we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth. That’s on me. As a result, operating expenses grew quickly.
Translated: The free money party from VCs is over. Across the board, it's OVER. Time for actual good businesses. No more spending $1.50 to make $0.60 and grow.
Hard times coming for a lot of people, and only some people that I feel deserve it. Overall, I agree. The Free Money Party is over and it's going to be a net good.
I do wonder how much of the shitty behavior we've seen in the past 10-15 years eventually falls back to "Whatever, we'll just get more money if we need it". I am optimistic of businesses that do their work and stay out of politics, that actually need to be competitive, that give a shit about customers because they really do need you.
Whatever you think about the letter, the fact that they're providing reasonable severance/vesting/healthcare support proves a large degree of competence and ethics.
My simple policy is: I will never stop talking trash, never work for, and avoid entirely any company that lays people off without the basic ethics of providing reasonable financial support. The companies providing two weeks should be shamed for eternity.
As long as enough people adopt this attitude it will effectively force companies to behave well, even if they don't want to. Tech workers on HN have particularly powerful influence in this regard and should utilize it.
(It'd be great if layoffs.fyi provided severance data to shame and reward the right companies.)
well, i guess after the pandemic, all of the fake websites for local eateries that didn't have websites have been made (so that doordash owns the search and orders even if the user thought they were ordering directly), so that's a department no longer needed. /s
Undercut competition by burning raised capital. Then once you've got the market share, you boil the frogs you gathered. I believe the euphemism around these parts is "disruption".
This is the reality of the astoundingly terrible business of food delivery. Take something with already razor thin margins, add multiple layers of middle men each with their own overhead and create the amazing situation where the product is incredibly expensive but most of the middle man take either low or no margins and the delivery person collects a rent but then loses that right away on vehicle maintenance and gas in many cases.
It's the biggest lose lose lose lose of all time. The only real winner is the government who collects tax on this net loss of a transaction.
This is also why direct delivery like a pizza shop or chinese place with its own delivery drivers works but the app delivery model doesn't.
Sadly in some areas Uber eats and such have caused mom n pop delivery to disappear. There's a chain in Los Angeles, Lucifer's Pizza, which no longer offers delivery. If you call them up they tell you to use an app to order.
Papa John's in my area transparently subs delivery out to doordash now, and the experience is terrible. The drivers don't get tips (unless I happen to have cash, which I never do) and the pizzas arrive cold (presumably because they're trying to batch a lot of pizzas up in a single trip). I've given up on it.
>The pandemic presented sudden and unprecedented opportunities
We were hungry piggies at a trough and didn't care what was in it we just ate.
>Most of our investments are paying off
I got rich, what about you? Oh? no? Well too bad.
>we’ve always been disciplined in how we have managed our business...operating expenses grew quickly
We were/are not disciplined we just fly by the seat of our pants.
Where does one learn disgusting corporate double speak like this? Its so common now it must be taught somewhere. Seeing a person write something like this with a straight face makes me understand why some people believe demons are a real thing.
Meta and Stripe attract some of the top tech talent and are seen as leaders in their respective fields. Thus, their actions often create de facto templates for other companies following suit.
Also the senior leadership in these companies are all part of overlapping social circles, have similar educational backgrounds, have a similar media diet, etc.
While I do feel sorry for the people who are losing their jobs, I do wonder why so many of these unicorns / VC funded / startups / Silicon Vally darlings, all seems like they are, shall we say, a bit overstaffed?
If you can lay off between 10% or more of the staff and expect to continue to operate unimpeded, then why didn't they do it sooner? I'm not counting Twitter, because while perhaps overstaffed, firing 50%+ is just nuts.
The whole point of taking funding is that it lets a company grow headcount ahead of achieving the sales to sustain it. So they'll estimate that X headcount will be needed Y months in the future. When growth doesn't materialize then X comes down and when funding is less available then Y comes down. Then they have layoffs.
X and Y became unusually high in 2021. If we have an actual recession I'd expect more layoffs from the same companies.
Senior Twitter engineer Siru Murugesan claimed that he only worked four hours per week and acted as though this were not at all uncommon.
He also bluntly stated that Twitter was not concerned with being a profitable business venture, as they were not capitalists but socialists (his words).
This was backed up by "Lead Client Partner" Alex Martinez, who stated that Twitter's focus on being ideologically driven led to them becoming unprofitable.
Unless Twitter's culture of unprofitability and dead weight employment programs is unique in SV, perhaps other companies in midst of layoffs have similar reasons as did the new Twitter owner.
I am all for free markets, but I am frustrated about how these unprofitable distribution companies just won't die. They are a net negative for our society.
These CEO letters are meaningless. They are written by obscenely paid PR hacks and follow the same template.
* This is the most difficult change to COMPANY NAME HERE that I’ve had to announce in our almost n-year history. Today, we are reducing our corporate headcount by approximately n people and saying goodbye to many talented teammates.*
* While there is no great way to manage this process, we strive to treat each of you with respect and integrity. Each of you who is impacted will have the opportunity to speak to a leader this week.*
* While I want to focus today’s attention on our talented teammates who are departing, I did want to say a few words to the team that is staying and carrying the baton. While today’s news is painful, I continue to be very optimistic about our future and convinced of the importance of the role we can play in the world.*
I genuinely don't understand comments like this. Do you know who wrote the letter? Do you know how much they get paid?
Communications is a real skill with actual, real people that devote their careers to doing it well. And they get paid fairly, unless you know something I don't.
Nobody wants to write this letter, least of all the PR person who wrote it.
What would you have the CEO say, if not what they all say when this happens? "Our business isn't growing like we hoped now get fucked"?
Seriously, what do you think that looks like if not exactly what was written?
> We sped up our hiring to catch up with our growth and started many new businesses in response to feedback from our audiences.
> Most of our investments are paying off, and while we’ve always been disciplined in how we have managed our business and operational metrics, we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth
> While our business continues to grow fast, given how quickly we hired, our operating expenses – if left unabated – would continue to outgrow our revenue.
We grew too fast and revenue wasn't catching up. What other tangibles do you want? Would they somehow help the situation?
I don't at all. I'm just trying to figure out what people are supposed to be doing. And I was mostly responding to the comment of "obscenely paid PR hacks" in the first place...just unnecessarily cynical.
It was a long letter b/c it provided a lot of information. The information you're asking for was wrapped up in 3 sentences. But I guess that was still too long?
If it's not apologetic, they get reamed for being too cold/unsympethetic.
The CEO letter is meaningless, but the severance and departing benefits look pretty generous at least. A nice little cushion while they look for new jobs. I've certainly seen much worse.
I'm no supporter of PR speak. The CEO ranks seem to have no problem in finding their next gig. Some some receive ludicrous compensation even when the company does poorly.
I'm just not sure what is the desired outcome here? And how do we get there?
One possibile way to take personal responsibility could be to add "and therefore I will reduce my compensation by the same percentage we are reducing headcount". (Based on other comments, that would be 6%.)
While it's true stock has dropped like a rock since then, it's impacted corporate employee comp as well so I don't agree that stock tanking exclusively impacted the CEO and hence he has paid for the bad decisions.
Don't you think this is pretty childish? When market conditions change companies need to adapt, sometimes that means laying people off. Isn't that the job of the CEO? They are responsible for the health of the company overall. I don't see why they should be punished for making adjustments to make the company competitive.
In general I agree with you, yes, market conditions change, and CEOs need to make sometimes tough choices in response.
However, the specific context here is this quote from the CEO:
> we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth. That’s on me.
If the CEO admits they made a mistake that led to the current layoffs then I think it would be admirable to take personal responsibility and accept some personal consequences as a result.
> When market conditions chance, companies need to adapt
I agree with that part ^
Let me frame this more broadly. _How_ and _when_ should companies adapt? There are many ways, across many timescales.
I'll give a made up example, hopefully in a reasonable ballpark. A company needs to save $250M / year. Let's say there are three options under consideration, not mutually exclusive / can be blended:
Option A: Lay off 1% of 10,000 employees, saving $250M/year.
Option B: 15% across the board salary cuts, saving $250M/year.
When the company does well they receive exorbitant bonuses. The CEO of Doordash is privy to a $400m bonus hitting some milestones, that more than pays of the jobs laid off today.
To be clear, the $400m "bonus" isn't a bonus at all. It's an incentive package that's based on the price of the stock sustaining over 180 days, and the first milestone of this incentive package starts at $187.50, which is >3x the current price. $DASH was above $187.50 last year but didn't meet the 180 day duration requirement.
In other words, Tony hasn't gotten paid anything from this package, and may never will.
The package is described in the revised s1, and DoorDash is required to report it because they have to account for this package (probabilistically via Monte Carlo simulations) on their books.
Implication is that you get a strike against you which is publicly documented. This also serves a purpose of sending a message to middle-management that we should not repeat this strategic mistake of over-hiring when things are hot and then when things slowdown going through this painful process of separation. I am hopeful that this public admission will inculcate a culture of holding everyone accountable rather than "emperor has no clothes" culture where people live in denial.
What would you rather the CEO say? It’s easy to complain about everything but orders of magnitude more difficult to think critically and offer ways to improve it.
It’s more difficult but that desire to think critically and put in the effort is what makes the community here so much better than most sites.
For some reason every layoff press release on HN gets the "The CEO takes responsability but doesn't actually" comments.
I'm not sure what people expect, "I will whip myself once for every employee I had to layoff to atone for overhiring during one of the biggest market bull run"?
It's especially weird considering that DoorDash is probably the company that had the best reason to overhire during a pandemic where delivery apps where being used a lot more than usual.
> I will whip myself once for every employee I had to layoff
I like the sound of that! Joking aside, while physical harm may not fly I can imagine a scenario where it hits the CEOs' wallets either by losing stock options/grants or actual salary based on the number of employees they had to layoff. Because seriously, what does it even mean for the CEO to take responsibility when there are no actual consequences for them? If they're doing it to save the business (which they are) then just say that instead of saying they take responsibility as the latter is just virtue signaling.
From the investor's perspective the CEO's job is to do what's good for the company, which doesn't always involve doing what's good for some or all the employees, laying a lot of developers off is not a bad thing from the perspective of the business unless their work is needed and there is enough money to pay them.
Right, so the CEO should just say that. Effectively the layoff was out of their control. It was the best decision for the business (shareholders). The act of saying "I take full responsibility" is pure virtue signaling unless it actually has consequences for them. Instead they should say, "I made the best decision for the shareholders."
I think the bitterness comes from the big payoffs that CEOs get when the company does well. There's something upsetting about leadership taking the upside reward for the big wins but leaving the downside risk for everyone else.
A somewhat common way for CEOs to take responsibility used to be to forgo their bonuses or to take a pay cut, which while still not too meaningful, does at least involve some more responsibility than just plain PR speak.
If the CEO says they'll resign, people will say they're taking the easy way out, and anyway, it's no skin off their back because golden parachute (if they were a good negotiator when they were hired) or anyway their salary was probably high, etc.
It's an unwinnable game in the court of public opinion, so why do it? Because it signals to the underlings that the CEO is not expecting resignations from them.
Being CEO means making difficult decisions, and it isn't realistic to expect a CEO to only serve during good times. That said, I think it would go a long way towards appeasement if the messaging was more along the lines of "I will be withholding payment to myself until such time as we're in the black again" or something similar showing personal consequences beyond "mea culpa!" nonsense PR messaging.
Maybe it's reasonable to expect a CEO to resign when layoffs happen during a market upswing but... during a market downturn like this it's kind of inevitable to see layoffs in a services-based company when services are the some of the easiest things for consumers to scale back on when belt-tightening occurs. A change in leadership would only further hurt the people staying in the company, IMO.
Maybe start by having a sustainable growth (or you know, no growth!) so you don't have to write a completely emotionless letter explaining why you have to lay off a whole village?
Remember the CEO is also accountable to the board and investors who have certain expectations.
The morality here is hard because the end results are largely driven by the system. Sure, there are some leaders who are particularly ill-suited for their jobs from the employee POV. Unfortunately some of those leaders serve their investors quite well.
If you point one finger, you'll quickly realize you might need many more to follow the interconnected trail of power.
Also let's not forget that so much of Silicon Valley's advantageous job market is linked to investor behavior, good and bad. My point? Sure, criticize these feaux-emotional layoff letters, just don't forget to look back to see the reality distortion field already in place when you joined that job.
You really think so? I've picked many places to work based on my perception of their business model stability and how they treat people. I'm far from perfect of course.
I think many employees and investors care about employee retention. I don't know how much it factors in, but it is something.
In terms of budget, wonder how many staff would equal CEO compensation. A lot of orgs out there carry on just fine through absence and transitions at the top.
Like most growth-phase startups from SV, Doordash are not profitable at the moment and have no profit to speak of with an EPS of _negative_ $2.41. Please correct your "$700m in gross profit a quarter" to "$1.7b in revenue a quarter" or "$296m in net loss a quarter" [1].
There is no good reason that any third party should see more than a tiny tiny bit of operating money for the act of local drivers delivering local food from local restaurants to local customers.
They made a bit of money in the beginning, great. Time to move on to a fairer solution, given that it's trivially easy to replicate.
The money that they already have that they can use to influence other companies and government, et al.
This is all very common; your likely problem is that you've bought into the "free market" fantasy; that somehow some meritorious competitor will rise above the others. Unfortunately, a free market like that requires more protections against e.g. "healthy competition" than we currently have.
This is a valid argument for an entrenched monopoly, but DoorDash already has lots of big, powerful competitors (e.g. Uber). Are you suggesting they’re all involved in a price-fixing racket?
That’s possible, of course, but I don’t think it’s the most plausible hypothesis without more evidence.
This presumes that "as long as technically legal, what they're doing is fine" and I don't subscribe to that necessarily -- I think they can, and are, screwing people legally -- in fact, we've heard all the weird stories about price frontrunning, etc. I'd add Uber to the list of bad guys too. Screw 'em all.
I don't care about legality, I care about fairness and obvious first principle things. Namely: everyone here knows it would be extremely cheap and easy to build a local uber/doordash whatever competitor. Lots of off the shelf software to do so.
I don't believe those companies deserve that money for doing relatively little work, especially today. This is generally in tune even with the principles of intellectual property, namely a temporary advantage.
No need anymore. Like a lot of services, local would be better.
I guess you’re implying that resignation would be the more just course of action from the CEO, but I don’t think everyone sees it that way (not me for 1).
I think resignation would be the more cowardly move. The ceo dug a deep hole and at least 1k ppl lost their job. They have the responsibility of digging out of that hole before more ppl have to get laid off.
Resigning now would read to me like “hey guys, I know I made a mess here but, oh well, have fun dealing with it, good luck to the next guy”. Absolutely would not work with someone like that in future prospects
To add some context, in Canada, if you lose your job as a work permit holder, you can stay until the expiry date of the permit. In Germany, you can get a six-month jobseeker residence permit in this case. In France, you can stay until the expiry date of your work permit, then renew it for one extra year, and then if you still have remaining entitlement to unemployment benefits, extend it until the end of the benefits. Not every country is like the US, where you have 60 days to uproot and leave.
Japan’s unemployment insurance won’t pay out after the end of a work permit even if there is a remaining entitlement、because your not ‘available to work’, even if you’re on a specific job seeking permit extension.
"An alien admitted or otherwise provided status in E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1 or TN classification and his or her dependents shall not be considered to have failed to maintain nonimmigrant status solely on the basis of a cessation of the employment on which the alien's classification was based, for up to 60 consecutive days or until the end of the authorized validity period, whichever is shorter, once during each authorized validity period. DHS may eliminate or shorten this 60-day period as a matter of discretion. Unless otherwise authorized under 8 CFR 274a.12, the alien may not work during such a period."
This is also what I've been told by my company's lawyers.
I think the wording is "As soon as administratively possible" - But I've also read that to mean within 24 hours of your termination you need to have left the United States, and have always adhered to that rule.
I think the 24hr/"end of the day" thing is for the natural termination - i.e. you knew when your TN term ended, and were expected to leave when it's done and have made plans for it. Even then though I've never heard of people getting sticky for reasonable travel time also, just that you clearly had the plan and intent to leave the country after your work permission expired. But who knows, the whole system is rife with inequal results due to reliance on individual border staff decisions.
If you get fired/company folds/etc. then I think the 60 days things holds.
This was true for H1B as well; the existing 60-day rule is something that USCIS came up with back in 2017. But, since it's an administrative rule rather than a law, it can also be amended or scrapped that much easier, too.
TN visas have some advantages. There are no yearly caps and it can be renewed indefinitely. Also easier to get a new job. One disadvantage is it is not dual intent.
The I-485 would have to be rejected, or, you lose your job after the I-485 is filed. Even then if you maintain yourself for 6 months after the I-485 was filed and your employer doesn't withdraw the approved I-140, you can find a new job under AC21; or get lucky with no interview request or RFE.
The pain point is that you won't be able to travel after I-485 filing until your Advanced Parole turns up and you'll depend on EADs if you want to change jobs under AC21.
You could have your Green Card before you even win the H1-B lottery.
What other countries would you say are friendlier and easier to immigrate to than the US? In most places it is not an option unless you have a job offer or significant wealth.
Have you tried to immigrate to the US? Have you tried to immigrate to any country in the EU or the UK? The latter is far easier than the former (I'm English living in the US with a Finnish wife, so have had to look at all these systems since Brexit).
I have. The UK is as hard or possibly even harder now (since the brexit) as US. The rest of EU is not as hard but you need to weigh by pay difference and how many people actually want to immigrate, then it's not even close.
Essentially the UK requires you to speak English and have a job offer over 26k GBP in a skilled role where 'Skilled' expects the skills needed are that of an 18 year old school leaver, or less skill requirements if it's a role with a shortage, or less money if you have an advanced degree. That's pretty open IMO.
My recollection is UK immigration required you to pass some sort of UK version of TOEFL. US only has an official "language test" during naturalization and it's basically just one question that immigration officer asks you. Quite a difference in effort.
Tier 2 general visa is much easier than H1-B. Tier 2 ICT is near instant. You can then switch the latter to the former quite easily. And then it's 5 years flat to having ILR (which is a green card equivalent).
If you're Indian, you're waiting way longer than that in the US.
However, I think if you're not from India/China/Mexico, the constraint is that getting an H-1B is lottery-bound, and then you'll get the GC easily.
While there may be a lot of countries where it may be harder in terms of qualifications, the US is probably singular among western democracies around the capriciousness and randomness of its processes. Particularly for skilled immigrants, and particularly those from India and China.
Which other country goes "skilled immigrants RAH RAH!" but also imposes a random lottery instead of going on the basis of some kind of points/job offer based system? In which other country can you have a "manager" in your job title and then get a fast track to PR (L1-A) regardless of whether you are a Technical Account Manager 2 years out of school vs a Director with 20 years of experience?
Which other country imposes arbitrary moving dates for when you can get permanent residency? My understanding is every western democracy has a well defined path to permanent residency from a work visa. In Canada it is 0-3 years, in the EU it is 2-5 years (based on various factors). But once you tick those boxes you know how much time it will take. In the US, it really depends on USCIS's budget, the phase of the moon, which country you are born in, and how many green cards they decide to "waste" in any given year.
>Which other country goes "skilled immigrants RAH RAH!" but also imposes a random lottery instead of going on the basis of some kind of points/job offer based system?
I think I've posted about this before, but yeah it's pretty ridiculous. My college girlfriend was a foreign exchange student from India, was here all through highschool, had a fullride to college via a (maybe government sponsored?) academic scholarship, graduated with her degree in electrical engineering 2nd in her class, and got a 6 figure job right of out college. She got kicked out about a year later because she didn't "win" the "lottery" and her visa wasn't renewed. What a sheer fucking waste of talent and time and money educating her just to boot her out of the country like that.
A literal week after she was forced to leave, I was talking to my uber driver who told me of her sister's boyfriend who was also an Indian emigrant, in and out of court/jail for petty theft and various levels of assault/battery, that somehow managed to secure his citizenship a couple of months prior. I know it's just one anecdote among literally thousands of possibly millions of cases, but what a fucking crazy world we live in today where that's how things can play out.
Being young and dumb and in love, I briefly floated the idea of marriage to secure her a greencard, but she talked me out of it and we ended up parting as friends when she left. Lost contact after she got married a few years later and moved to Australia with her new partner so she definitely landed okay and I am so extremely happy where I am today in life and with my current partner, but somedays my mind just wanders and I find myself reminiscing and wondering about what could've been.
> instead of going on the basis of some kind of points/job offer based system
Personal opinion: I think the point based systems are unfair.
For example, you get points by merely finishing college. Someone who didn’t have the opportunity to do college is not necessarily a low-skill worker neither are they less intelligent. A fairer thing will be to access people individually on their capabilities.
The US has things like the O1 visa which in my opinion is not random and more fair than most systems. But a random system is also valuable and necessary, so you need both.
I agree they are not entirely fair.
However lottery/random systems have a lot of burden of work that ends up wasted, leading employers to shy away from doing it. If you have do X amount of paperwork per candidate and there is only a 20% chance of getting through to the lottery, why do it?
In the absence of enough funding and employees at USCIS to be able to individually assess people, having some kind of cutoff criteria is better than a lottery. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
> unless you have a job offer or significant wealth
Isn't that exactly the same for the US ? If anything, because of the lottery, having a job offer is only gives you a 30% chance to actually get the visa. The USA (practically) has no path to permanent residency if you are Indian.
Even just getting to the job offer needs you to be on an F1-OPT which usually implies between $100-200k of college tuition just to apply for a job permit.
In that sense, the US needs both significant wealth & a job offer all while giving no pathway to permanent residency if you're born in the wrong country.
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For tech workers: Canada, the EU (through France, Ireland) and Australia are certainly easier to immigrate to. (wages are another question). Singapore & Dubai/UAE are popular destinations for working, though PRs can be awkward or impossible.
Even supposed harder to immigrate countries look easier, if you think about how every country needs you to be fluent in the local language. That everyone learns English is a testament to the political dominance of the USA & the UK over the last 300 years, and not a foregone conclusion.
There are over a billion people in India. There are probably more people in India who would like to move to the US than there are people currently in the US.
I’m sympathetic, but it’s not really feasible for the US to accommodate everyone in the world and it’s not like the US owes it to anyone to just let anyone live there just because they’d like to.
I mean, people aren't asking for infinite slots for Indians. Hell, they aren't even asking for more slots.
They are asking for one or multiple of :
1. Use of lapsed green cards slots from other categories to be used for pending green cards.
2. Removal/Relaxing of the 7% rule, which uniquely inconveniences Indians. (If the idea is diversity, then in almost every way India is more diverse than arbitrarily formed culturally homogeneous tiny nations around the world.)
3. More humane work permit rules for those who have a PR in the waiting. Eg: relaxing the insane 60 day unemployment rule, reducing need to restamp visa incredibly often, allowing secondary sources of income or starting a startup.
4. More stable processing times and predictions on how long PR waiting time actually are. Current estimates vary from 20-100 years. That is simply unacceptable as a range.
With all this stuff, it sounds like the country is telling you that they don't really want you there. Why do you insist on going someplace where you're not wanted? You're not a citizen, so you don't really have a right to complain about the immigration process. Perhaps look for a country that actually welcomes immigrants?
Removal/Relaxing of the 7% rule, which uniquely inconveniences Indians. (If the idea is diversity, then in almost every way India is more diverse than arbitrarily formed culturally homogeneous tiny nations around the world.
Ah I see, so if country A has a million people and country B has a billion people then people from country A have a 1000x higher probability of getting a green card? Now I understand the problem.
USA hands out a million green cards, but only 150k for employment based. For all the talks of immigrants bringing skills, we are really not preferred. They'll hand out 50k "diversity visas" by lottery, but God forbid more than 10k indians come into the country for their skills. And even the skills based visas barely prefer more skilled or in demand immigrants. That's what they call "abuse" by H1B/eb1 but also oppose any wage based or PhD preferring rules. Hypocrites hiding their true racist intentions.
If you are arguing that there are an unsustainable number of employment based green cards being handed out, you could not be more wrong.
USA hands out a million green cards every year. But only 150k are employment based. These are capped at 7% for each country. Only 10k out of a million green cards are assigned per year for Indian immigrants based on their employments.
For all the talk of meritocracy, looking beyond skin color, and valuing high skilled immigrants, USA definitely has policies that discriminate on national origin and actively encourage low skilled immigration (2 million unauthorized border crossings, policies allowing rampant "abuse" in h1b/eb1c visas whenever high skilled immigrants are concerned, constant opposition to making it easier for PhDs to get a green card or say putting wage rules on h1b/eb1,2,3).
The proportion of family member visas to skilled worker visas that US visas are skewed significantly towards the former compared to most other countries.
It is the family pathway which is available only to very small communities whose (mostly) brothers immigrated to the US in the 80-90s. That's because afaik, it also has a 20-ish year waiting. So the convenience store owners are very likely to be folks from this group that are getting green cards for applications they put in when they used to young. There is a reason they all seem to be old men. Most young Indians at these stores are part-time workers on visa studying at universities nearby.
For the last couple of decades, a US university degree -> STEM job is the only way known legal way for an Indian to come to US on their own merit. I specify STEM, because none of the other professions get the STEM-OPT (3 tries at the low-probability h1b lottery vs 1 try for normal students), so most US employers blanket reject candidates in non-STEM professions.
I can say about Germany. There is a working visa for qualified workers called Blue Card which is what most software engineers get. With it you can stay unemployed for three months and can apply for a jobseeker visa after that without having to return. Also if you know German above certain level you can get a permanent residency after less than two years, which is not tied to being employed
I’ve traveled around and looking into residing outside of my native USA. It’s much easier in many places to get residency. You can get a job offer which leads to a work visa pretty easily. You can start a company and hire yourself. You can simply apply for residency if you have foreign sourced income. You can buy a property or invest. There are lots of options, and most of these options are not options in the USA.
From what I've heard from friends, Canada is more straightforward to immigrate to and become a PR. It is often used as a holding office for those with visa issues in the US by big tech companies.
The majority of countries people would actually want to work in. All of the EU, UK, countries like Australia give permanent residence to Global Talents (I've recently got this visa), also accepted by NZ. It's much easier to get a work permit for countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan (no silly several months wait/October-only start date/raffle for H-1B) etc.
I love the US, lived there for a decade and would love to go back to California. But I'd never go on H-1B and I don't see anyone sponsoring me a green card again (returned mine seven years ago). So there's that.
TL;DR: The US is not easy to (legally) immigrate to compared to many other places.
Work visa to permanent residence to citizenship is how most immigrants do that. Family immigration is the only thing that's easier, but, of course, it requires a relative to sponsor - which most potential immigrants do not have.
That is true. USA has rules that prefer low skilled immigration, preferably family based, and forces even the high skilled immigration visas to be broad enough to not really prefer high skilled immigrants. Further, USA discriminates based on national origin.
Canada has policies that prefer high skilled immigrants coming for employment, and does not discriminate on where they come from.
So yeah, USA has more difficult for immigrants from big countries who want to contribute with their skills, while Canada welcomes those.
Japan's system seems like Canada's, and basically the opposite of the US's: high-skill professionals easily get 5-year work visas, and can apply for permanent residence (PR) after 1 or 3 years depending on points. Having family members in the country, however, is worthless unless you marry a Japanese national.
Honestly, I don't see why a country would prefer people to bring in all their distant cousins, rather than a bunch of highly skilled professionals who contribute a lot to the economy.
USA is very friendly to immigrants - it is not a homogeneous society, and there is mutual respect of all religions, faiths, and languages. On contrast, I find many populations in EU to be actively hostile towards immigrants (in Germany one will have a difficult time not knowing German, for example).
As a result, it is a demand and supply problem. Compare how many are wanting to immigrate to, say, Germany, Austria or Switzerland, as opposed to US.
> in Germany one will have a difficult time not knowing German, for example
No, that couldn't be farther from the truth. I lived in Germany, and have friends there who still don't know German after 10+ years and never have any problems. If you work in a non-office industry you need German, but in office/tech workplaces nobody knows German.
I’d honestly not want an immigrant in my country who lives there for 10 years without learning the language. What a way to not make any effort to integrate into your chosen society.
In my experience, integration into a society is a gradual process with no well-defined boundaries. Maybe this is where US and many seemingly homogeneous EU countries differ?
Even if it was a “gradual” process it’s 10+ years. How do you talk to the people of that nation without learning any English? What about anything to do with documentation or the government?
Integrating into a society can mean many things but the FIRST step of that should be learning the local language to be able to talk to locals.
By the way, I’m American. Anyone who lives here for that long without learning English is what I’m talking about.
Learning the language may not be a strict requirement if the country and its people are friendly [] to immigrants. In that case the country makes extra effort to be welcoming and offers translation in their Government affairs.
For example, almost all Government locations in the Bay Area make every document available in several languages, including posted signs, forms etc.. And they have staff who can speak multiple languages. Also, many elders of Chinatown in San Francisco do not speak English, have spent almost all of their life here, yet are reasonably integrated into the American society (their kids generally know English).
[] Friendly needs explanation: US is friendly once you immigrate, not while you are immigrating. This is simply the demand-supply forces at play (too many people wanting to immigrate).
I may be mistaken, but I don't think any EU country makes an active and conscious effort to be "immigrant friendly".
Also, by "immigrant" I mean those who immigrate legally. American media clubs both legal immigrants and illegal aliens into the "immigrant" category, which can be hella confusing.
Because a large percentage of Germans probably speak English so you can still communicate with them without learning German. This is not the same as a single language country.
And yet many don’t - certainly wasn’t the case in my travels in Germany that everyone could speak English and that was coming into it as a tourist. Surely most Germans would prefer to speak their native language among friends as well, implying no such need among those who’ve never been able to learn it.
Clearly you can manage but I stand by my original opinion that I would not approve of hearing such a story from an immigrant.
>And yet many don’t - certainly wasn’t the case in my travels in Germany that everyone could speak English and that was coming into it as a tourist.
I've been a tourist in Germany too. Basically, if the German person you're talking to is university-educated, they speak English, and probably extremely well. If they aren't (like the cashier at the supermarket), they probably don't speak English much at all.
> I’d honestly not want an immigrant in my country who lives there for 10 years without learning the language. What a way to not make any effort to integrate into your chosen society.
Maybe they just there to save some amount of money and go back to their country?
That's not an excuse for not integrating into a culture with the bare minimum amount of effort. It is not hard to learn a language with 10 years of immersion.
French to a B2 certificate level from l’Académie Française without living in a Francophone country. Done in 2 years by self studying and forced media immersion. It is not hard to learn a foreign language in 10 years. Also watched my parents learn English in a year as a child moving to an Anglophone country.
Way to cut out the part where I said “it’s not hard to learn a foreign language” and just drop the time scale. It’s of course a lot of work but it is NOT difficult with such an opportunity to absord and practice.
Every human being can learn to speak any language in 10 years. Poor immigrants do it in their chosen nations of residence all the time. Anyone who doesn’t is not trying, I’m sad to say.
“That's not an excuse for not integrating into a culture with the bare minimum amount of effort. It is not hard to learn a language with 10 years of immersion.”
Is it hard to learn a language in a year? Yes! That is not what I said. I said that not making the modicum of effort required over 10 years of practice and immersion required to achieve functional fluency is not difficult. It simply is not. The passive input alone is absolutely enormous, and it’s the least you can do to a country that’s graciously accepted you into its own borders.
Germany, Austria or Switzerland all have higher net immigration per capita than US. According to 2015-2020 average (estimate) more than twice as many people moved to Germany than to US (relative to population of course).
Interesting statistic. Though all three seem so homogeneous, and hence a bit hostile ("integrate into our culture, else..."). Again, I am not saying they are, just that they seem so. Stark difference to the US, with its melting-pot cities... :-)
The system is easier to qualify for than other countries, provided you can find a sponsoring employer, but it is also slow and requires that you engage an attorney because it's archaic.
I'm not in the US, but as an immigrant myself I can say it's incredibly stressful to be on a working visa during job changes and during a period of unstable economy. Especially if you have family.
To be rational, I work in academia and I shouldn't need to worry too much about job safety and/or visa applications, but I still semi-regularly woke up at night from nightmares of my visa expiring, not being renewed, suddenly being deported, or similar stuff.
I got my permanent residence earlier this year and all of it stopped. It gives you some sense of stability/security. It also makes one feel a bit more accepted in society by not needing to leave it if a work agreement (for whatever reason) ends.
I'm qualified to apply for a permanent residence in 4 months.
The worst thing is that if I get laid off, the 5-year clock resets, and it would waste almost 5 years.
Technically, it takes 45+ days to lay off someone. However, the application requires a letter from the employer to confirm I'm still needed at a job, which means the lay-off just a few days before the application could invalidate the application and has a potential to reset the clock.
It's a slap in the face of legal immigrants. This, along with quotas that restrict permanent residency based on place of birth, are inhumane policies that signal to legal immigrants that they are not wanted here. Apparently, the fact that millions of hispanic illegal immigrants already break the putative purpose of the quota: that no large segment of the population has close ties to any given country, so that they can not disproportionately influence foreign policy toward that country (e.g., Donetsk and Luhansk) is of no consequence: the quota remains in place. Meanwhile, Canada is planning to bring in 500,000 immigrants a year to replace boomers leaving the workforce. A phenomenal opportunity to bring in highly-paid citizens who will integrate very easily into the country and provide economic benefits from day one to the host country.
They shouldn't, just like Russia shouldn't be counted (because it has a very peculiar situation with shared citizenship with the other former Soviet Republics.)
Not the GP but a larger total number means you have a higher likelihood of being one of the people to be granted entry. A country of 1000 people may accept 10 people and that be a very large per-capita rate, but odds of you being one of 10 people accepted out of billions of possible immigrants is very low. It's not like it's one visa application for all countries in the world.
Wow 38% of Saudi Arabia's population are immigrants? Never imagined that one. Always seemed like a closed off country which people couldn't even travel to for tourism (unless making a pilgrimage to Mecca as a Muslim) until recently (2019).
Looks like they have 60 days to find a new job... I thought the grace period was shorter when I commented, but still that's not much time compared to other countries I've lived in. I'm from the USA. I think the way the US treats skilled workers is stupid. We want smart skilled people to immigrate, not make it hard on them. Can you imagine living with the threat of being kicked out lingering over you? I would never feel secure or set down real roots in a country that might kick me out in 60 days.
Edit: Depending on the type of visa you're kicked out of the country much sooner than 60 days.
>I think the way the US treats skilled workers is stupid.
It is stupid, but it's apparently how Americans want it.
>We want smart skilled people to immigrate, not make it hard on them.
No, you want that. American voters don't seem to agree with you, or at least, not enough of them to make a change. Meanwhile, in other countries, smart skilled people have a relatively easy time immigrating. I'm in Japan and it couldn't get much easier for skilled professionals than this.
>Can you imagine living with the threat of being kicked out lingering over you? I would never feel secure or set down real roots in a country that might kick me out in 60 days.
Yeah, me neither. I'm not sure why people want to torture themselves by going to such a country. There are other places looking for skilled professionals, and that make the immigration process pretty painless and easy. People need to get over this mythical idea of the US being some great welcoming haven for immigrants; it really isn't these days.
Did you totally miss the Trump election? "Build the wall!"? The American voters (well, almost half of them) spoke loud and clear about their sentiments on immigration.
If tech companies were in charge, the borders would be mostly open, especially (or perhaps only) for skilled professionals. Obviously, this isn't the case, so the corporate lobbyists are not the ones responsible for America's anti-skilled-immigrant policy, the American voters are. It doesn't get "fixed" because it's politically unpopular to do so.
>"Build the wall" wasn't about high-skilled visa-having and tax-paying tech workers. Separate issue.
Wrong. The issue is immigration, period. Trump's voters are too stupid to tell the difference between high- and low-skilled immigrants. They're nativists: they want only "real Americans" (i.e., white Christians) in America, and not more people who don't fit that mold.
>Nobody's really campaigned on "the H1B system should be a byzantine nightmare" but somehow that's what we got.
You got that because the system, just like any long-running software system that gets hacks upon hacks and never gets a proper refactor, turns into a jumbled mess over time. The system was never fixed because there is no political will to do so. Other countries have leaders that aren't always fighting with each other over every single thing, and decided together that they want more high-skilled immigrants to help their economies because they recognize the value such immigrants bring (they can look at America's 20th century history to see this, after all: look how many tech companies were started by immigrants, for instance), so they cleaned up their immigration policies to achieve this goal. That's how it is here in Japan: immigrating as a skilled worker is extremely easy. It wasn't like this 20 years ago at all. Since the leaders wanted it, and the people weren't opposed in any great way, it got done. America can't do that: the leaders are too divided, and the voters will punish anyone who tries. The Dems can try it, but the Reps will oppose it. Any Reps who don't will be voted out by the MAGAts. This is why things are the way they are in America.
You're confusing vacations with immigration. If that "guest" has come to your house on the premise that they're going to live with you, and you kick them out, yes, that is bad.
We even have laws about this, that's why there's a whole eviction process and it applies to people living with you as much as to normal tenants.
They are temporary but not sudden or on-demand. It's ok to say that they can only be here for a finite amount of time but not ok to uproot their lives suddenly.
If you spent a lot of time and money moving to a new country for work then you don't want to do all that again. In the USA, if you aren't a citizen and you have a working TN visa, then you literally have DAYS to find a new job or else you get deported. Thats why its important, because the current laws aren't realistic with finding a new job. They don't take into account the multiple interviews, the slow responses and callbacks. The entire process takes a long time.
Seems a bit non-sequitur. Whether you're mean or not is not a factor of whether you are giving people their rights. Like, if I called you a doofus on this website every time I saw you, I'm probably being mean but not denying you your rights or anything.
What entities a person born in a nation to is resources more so then someone born outside of that nation? You can’t control where you’re born, why would that be then used to determine… well, anything about you?
Why care about my parents or family? They are just people, I don't even like them as much as others. Why can't anyone be part of my family and why can't I jump to another one?
Society is a sacred part of what makes human beings human, it is why we are such a successful species. It requires cultural indoctrination and nationalism and things that definitely have an ugly side, but are also important to our function.
Your viewpoint basically assumes people have no loyalty, nationalism or responsibility to their society so they can be freely swapped with anybody.
Yea, if someone wants to, they can and should be able to freely swap which society they participate in.
We are successful as a species because we socialize, and there is no reason to limit that only to people who were born in specific geographic areas; that doesn’t make any sense.
It would make a lot more sense to group by shared goals and beliefs, with free movement as your goals and beliefs change.
Blind nationalistic loyalty is in no way a requirement for a successful human society.
You don't think it is easier to socialize with people with similar upbringings and culture to you? You don't think a group of people indoctrinated into a society from birth are more likely to share goals and beliefs than someone born into a different one?
Blind nationalism is bad, but absolutely no responsibility towards the society and the people that raised and support you is a crazy take. You're ideal would only work if we had 0 social programs and people were 100% responsible for providing for themselves and their loved ones, including education.
Of course you have a responsibility towards the society and the people who raised and support you.
That just doesn't involve excluding others from that society. They deserve, just as much as you, to participate (and improve!) in your society as you do.
My country only exists because people came from many other societies and brought the best parts of those societies together to create my country and its culture. I want that for everyone, if they want it for themselves.
I doubt your country was the result of a bunch of people from a bunch of different countries coming together to create a new nation. It was almost certainly a group of like minded people who all came from the same place creating an offshoot that is influenced by the original.
Especially given that the ability for global communication is newer than most existing countries.
I’ll be sure to tell all American history books that Alexander Hamilton and Lafayette (two off the top of my head because I listened to Hamilton recently, there absolutely were many many more) were actually from England and not the Caribbean and France respectively.
Are there any societies that have not exerted, or at least claimed the right to exert, control over who is and is not part of that society? The reasons for exercising that control may vary, but I can't think of or even imagine one that doesn't have this control.
The key is which things you exclude people over. A society can have values, but if those values discriminate based on aspects of a person that are outside of the person's control, that society is not operating ethically.
Western societies all value liberty, and liberty is incompatible with exclusion based on geographic origin.
All countries discriminate based on things you can never change like birth place. All countries. If they didn't they do not exist anymore. That's a poor strategy for western nation or any nation. Even the poorest countries don't allow that.
So? Nearly all countries at one point allowed slavery, refused to let women vote, and a ton of countries were ruled by an authoritarian monarchy, that doesn't mean it was a good idea.
If you let everyone in all at once then the place becomes exactly where they are fleeing from then there is no point in moving. Trying it would be the end of society. We hasn't tried killing every third baby but it is probably not a good idea regardless.
When women couldn't vote most men couldn't either. Just landholders. Slavery was an improvement on killing entire populations and authoritarian monarchy were better than savages like Genghis Khan. Whatever trouble you have with recent history go back.. things were worse.
What would happen if Canada decided to do this. Couldn't China send in 15 million people who vote to join Canada.
“Slavery was an improvement” ok, so honestly I find this insanely offensive and uncomfortably in line with some “white savior” arguments racists make, but I don’t want to be rude to you.
I guess all I can say is that I just don’t see how you can be so cruel to others like this.
Crueller was killing entire populations and removing any trace of their existence. Would you rather your family be slaves with the hope of rebellion or political issues changing or have your family be killed and body part spread all over?
Slavery is not a white/black issue although it might be for your location but the Arab slave trade was so massive and went on for so long it overshadows the trans Atlantic slave in size/scope and present day effects.
Things are not perfect today but they replaced things that were worse. That keeps happening. Why we vote for someone when we could introduce direct voting to me seems like a relic of the past that future generations will look negativity at.
People used to be free to go anywhere in the world, up until states commanded enough force to exclude foreigners.
Funny though how money is still allowed to go anywhere in the world, while people are trapped in their own countries (for better or worse). Those with money can make more money, taking advantage of labor and other resources that can't move, often to the detriment of labor at home and the environment abroad.
> People used to be free to go anywhere in the world...
Except that ~zero prehistoric people had access to the resources / skills / knowledge / etc. to actually travel really long distances.
And if they tried moving, at scale, into an already-inhabited area - well, whether or not the people in the destination qualified as a "state", I suspect that pretty universally resulted in violent push-back.
You don't have to go back to pre-history, passports for individuals didn't exist in the 19th century [0]. People were free to go to other countries whenever they wanted, and they did. There were travelers and migrations all over the place. Many cultures have traditions going back millennia of showing travellers generous hospitality.
Merchants activity was often regulated, with passports for commercial activity and other customs controls. But not people. The opposite of today.
I acknowledge that there would be concerns like you mention, like violent push-back from the natives, same as there are today. Some peoples are raised in insular cultures, some are welcoming, sometimes migrations cause understandable problems, etc.
I don't think the way we do things today is optimal. We've changed things so that money is given more freedom than people. And too many people are taught that foreigners are scary.
There's nothing innate to the universe that defines things this way. But they, as a society, have defined things that way. They, as a society, worked together to build up the infrastructure and the resources that are on top of that infrastructure. And then, as a society, decided what the rules are to participate in that society. So no, there's no universal law that says "the people born here have the rights of this society"; but the people of that society have decreed it so.
It's the same way every other right exists. Property rights don't exist as a law of the universe. Rather, "the people" decided they like the stability of having "permanent" control over things so, as a group, decided to enforce those rights.
What entitles you to the resources in your home anymore than someone outside of your home? They can't control that they were born outside of your home, so why should that be used to determine whether they can freely enter your home and make use of your resources or not?
This is not the compelling argument you think it is; in this analogy I:
* didn't buy my house, I inherited it,
* the people I inherited it from stole it from other people who
* also still live in the house somehow but just in the not-as-nice parts, and
* the house is gigantic and can easily fit literally billions more people without even coming close to exhausting the resources of the house, in fact
* bringing more people into the house would in fact substantially increase the house's shared ability to operate and provide for the members of the house.
So yeah, if we want to use this analogy in a meaningful way, nothing at all entitles me to my house!
All very compelling. I guess I wonder when you plan on permanently hosting as many refugees inside of your home as is physically possible (say 18 or if we're being charitable 9), how many would that be and when would you plan to start? After all, comrade, I'm sure we both agree that direct action would be a more material form of achieving justice through solidarity than the ultimately petit bourgeoisie activity of internet comment squabbling.
Of course, one could be motivated to make such impassioned outpourings by a guilt regarding an ultimately comfortable existence, a fear of lacking virtue, and a thrill of proselytizing the nonbelievers, rather than a compulsion to achieve material socioeconomic outcomes for the postcolonial working class of the world. But I'm sure, dear interlocutor, you are motivated by nothing of the sort, and your intentions are of course, impregnable and wholly pure.
I feel like you ignored the part where I absolutely would house as many refugees as I can in my home, were it as bountiful and spacious as the US is.
But it’s not, and I did buy this home with money rather than inherit it through theft, so instead of my home I will continue to vote and donate in ways that return the US to a pre-eugenics immigration policy.
This would give those refugees a much fairer chance at their own American dream, the one I was given because my ancestors oppressed and stole from the people who didn’t look like them.
Firstly no, they didn’t earn anything on their own, and secondly if they did make that choice it was selfish and not theirs to give away in the first place so their “ownership” here is a mistake on their part to believe they had.
You can’t own progress, you can’t own a society, and you definitely can’t own the concept of freedom (can’t believe that isn’t clear).
Yes they earned their society because they worked on it, no it wasn't a selfish choice because the society was and is theirs, and yes you can own progress, a society, and freedom. Which is why half the world is monkeys flinging feces and some would kill to enter the first world.
Uh they didn’t work alone on it, and they left a ton of people out, ripping freedom and progress from their hands without a second thought.
Your ancestors were thieves and oppressors, and took things that didn’t belong to them, which means the resulting better society isn’t yours or theirs to give or take. It’s free for whoever comes and helps grow it.
Honestly I wish we had some mechanism to cast out the entitled and let in the hopeful. People who believe as you do don’t deserve the gift of a progressive society.
Even Chimpanzee tribes have land borders that they protect. When do 'imaginary lines' just become 'lines', when they've been created and destroyed since pre-history?
One would expect that a species that looks at the stars and longs to explore would have found ways to reconcile coexistance of tribes. Alas, we are but hairless Chimpanzees with speech and clothes.
My point is while 'imaginary lines' seem theoretically interesting to point out when we discuss free movement, it's far too ingrained into animals to really change. Maybe in the distant future we will have planets as borders instead of country lines, but the lines will be there!
Also any reason to point out Chimpanzees have wars including patrolling land borders and recon missions :)
That's really nice.