Rohan Patel came to the United States from India in 2015 for a postgraduate degree in Computer Science. He said Patel was “fascinated by America,” and when he got a job in machine learning and search at Amazon two years later, he was elated.
“It was great joining big tech,” said Patel, who asked for a pseudonym so he could speak candidly. “People back home loved it. The money was great. It was a bit surreal to see yourself earning more than most of America.”
Eventually a recruiter from Meta (then Facebook) reached out, and Patel began working with the social media giant in New York in 2019. “I bought into a lot of Meta culture,” Patel said. He loved how fast the company was and the impact it had on the lives of billions of people around the world. “We felt invincible,” he said.
At 5 a.m. ET on November 9, an email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Patil’s inbox. It was dead Lay off More than 11,000 people, about 13% of the workforce. Patel was not surprised. reports About Mita’s impending layoffs had begun circulating just days ago. But at 6 am, Patel received another email. It contained a separation agreement, confirming that he was one of the persons let go.
“I really couldn’t believe it,” Patel said. Morale has been crashing at Meta since June, when Zuckerberg said he “Turn up the heatBut Patel thought it would be safe because he was a high performer. Layoffs were coming, he said, but like everyone else in the company, I thought, Not in my backyard!“
Bad news has been hitting thousands of tech workers lately. In 2022, tech companies across the country are making some of their biggest cuts yet, thanks to slowing pandemic-era online growth and a potential economic recession. More than 140,000 tech workers have lost their jobs so far this year, according to it Layoffs, a tracker created by Roger Lee, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur. Nearly two-thirds of the 45,000 cuts in November were from Meta, Amazon, Twitter and Cisco alone. Other companies, like Apple and Alphabet, have Slower or frozen employment altogether.
For Patel, however, there was an added complication – he suffers from H-1B work visa. This is the most common type of visa used by technology companies in the United States to recruit international workers in fields such as computer science where US representation is typically low. newly analytics USCIS data by Bloomberg showed that companies like Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe and Lyft employed at least 45,000 workers on H-1B visas over the past three years. Because the H-1B visa is tied to an employer, laid-off H-1B holders have 60 days to find a new job — or leave the country.
“I was basically a fucker,” Patel said.
Now, Patel and thousands of other laid-off workers with visas are racing against the clock to find new jobs to avoid having to suddenly uproot themselves and their families and leave the country. It can be a daunting situation—many have mortgages to pay, kids in school, or other life complications.
Hours after Meta announced layoffs last month, hundreds of workers on visas began frantically drafting an email to the company’s human resources department. They had a request: Since Meta was offering them four months of severance pay, could they stay on the payroll for that amount of time instead of being terminated after the federal notice two months earlier? Laid-off workers wrote that being on the payroll longer would give them more time to find something else. They noted that many tech companies have a hiring freeze, and finding new jobs during the holiday season will be difficult.
“[This] It puts our families, spouses, and school kids in a horrible situation,” the staff wrote in a draft email read to BuzzFeed News by a former Meta employee. “We look forward to getting a nice extension to the last day of the notice period at this difficult time for all of us.”
in WhatsApp group Among the hundreds of laid-off Meta employees who received work visas, the mood was tense, according to two former Chat employees who did not want to be identified for fear of Meta reprisals. Some people wanted more colleagues to sign the letter to put pressure on management. Others didn’t want to do anything about it for fear of angering senior executives.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the letter or whether Meta has considered the request.
Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, desperate posts from panicked workers over H-1B visas have swirled from Meta and other companies.
“I was terminated immediately without cause today by the Elon Twitter 2.0 team just before Thanksgiving,” Spread Yiwei Zuang, former machine learning engineer at Twitter. “I hold an H1B visa and only have 60 days to start a new job.” Zuang’s post has been shared more than 500 times, garnered nearly 15,000 likes and more than 800 comments filled with leads and messages of solidarity.
“Consider moving to Vancouver, too,” said one commenter. “As an experienced engineer, you can comfortably get permanent residence upon landing and never worry about the mysterious H1B again.”
Other LinkedIn users have posted that it is difficult to find a new job in the current climate. “60 days is not enough for most people to find a job in a recessionary economy and the holiday season,” says a software engineer Wrote on his own page. Hundreds if not thousands of people and their families will have to leave the country and start their lives over. Parents and their children can be separated. Years of hard work and personal sacrifice, working in the United States will amount to nothing.”
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