The solution is right there in OPs post: “give them three months on the books to find somewhere else that don't count against their visa. It will give them a chance to get settled and go on interviews.”

Thats it. HR knows who is working on visa. Inform them of the situation, give them 3 months, away all their accesses and let them spend the 3 months to look for a new job. Meta makes a bazillion USD pr yeah. Even if they had to pay 1000 works on visa for 3 months it wont make a dent in their profits.

For the employee that just relocated, on the other hand, this makes all the difference in the world.

Corporate greed is disgusting when its put above Human decency like this.

Isn't this literally what's happening? (Except it's 4 months, not 3?)

The problem is not so much the money, but the damn Visa: The moment you become unemployed, the countdown clock to deportation starts ticking.

This is a HUGE stress, and also puts you at a disadvantage against your prospect employers.

IMHO, there should be legislation for covering these cases. I.e. when you sponsor a Visa as an employer, it should be mandatory to pay the employee for a minimum of 12-24 months. If you want to lay them off, that's fine, but legally they would still be considered employed and paid in full until that grace period expires.

This why it happens, the company I work with would rather hire someone who is in a tight bind if their employment goes away, they'll work harder, be scared to lose it. etc. its called the H1B solution

Depending on the type of visa, it's not even like the situation depends on employment. I've seen a few people with stable jobs sent home from the US when their visa came up for renewal. Immigrating to the west, the USA in particular but also Canada, involves an element of luck, beyond what most people realize.

edit: To be very fair, though, there is an implicit warning in the paperwork and interview for every US work visa for exactly this kind of situation. It's not like they're playing some gotcha game. They don't come right out and say it, but, it's also not exactly hidden between the lines or in small print.

From my understanding the way layoffs were handled at meta for most ppl on visas the 60 day count down was not triggered until 2 months into severance

> The moment you become unemployed, the countdown clock to deportation starts ticking.

I am NOT 100% sure about this, but to the best of my knowledge, this is not the case in Canada. Work Permits are issues for the duration of the expected work and are usually at least one year long. If you lose your job, you can still remain in Canada until the expiry date of your work permit. You cannot simply start working elsewhere, but if you find a new job, your new employer can start the process of applying for a work permit for you while you are waiting in Canada. So this developer should be good to stay for another 11 to 12 months, if not even longer, while searching for a new job.

he's probably been given the pay but not the time to find his feet

Yeah, I’m almost certain the articles I read about the layoffs said that those on a Visa are getting an extra 90 days or so on payroll to find other employment. Maybe I’m mixing it up with Twitter?

It's even simpler: make 3 months notice mandatory across the board. Or heck, even 30 days notice would be a start. Of course there's no way you can rely on a corporation to do this voluntarily and regulation is unlikely given who pays the bills.

I wish there was a way to make this happen but I keep hearing software workers don't need unions because we already make so much money and the better ones have nothing to worry about.

Well I’m from Denmark with 3 months required by law (if you’ve been employeed more than 6 months. 1 month if its <6 months.), so I completely agree. Sometimes it just usually distracts from the conversion if you mention danish basic rights to americans :-)

3 months notice, while retaining access to company networks and campus?

I support "keeping them on the books" for purposes of visa and health insurance, for example, but there are legitimate security reasons to have people cut off quickly when they've been laid off or fired.

I don't think anyone advocating the 3 months thinks you need to keep them doing something. You just need to keep providing the benefits (salary, health if in the US, visa, etc.) for 3 months. Even in the EU you don't have to let someone come in to the office during that time.

I suppose if you had really, really, really good meals provided, it would be reasonable to argue about whether that was a benefit or there for people in the office.

A company can give them 3 months "paid time off" while also revoking their access to tools/systems,.

I've never been in the situation, but from what I gather then both things happen. Sometimes your are given notice (and pay) but access revoked. But its also my understanding that in many cases, maybe even most, the employee works in the 3 months. The employer may even be a bit more lax with time off so the employee can do interviews with other companies. I know in most cases the notice period is used for handing over projects/work to another employee at the company, so stuff doesn't just get dropped. I get the security aspect, but from my experience its just not something an employee usually does. Maybe some other Danes can pitch in with their experiences.

I think its b/c getting fired is bad ofc, but not bad like in the US. I mean we have universal basic income, free healthcare etc. So I just don't think people feel pressured in a way that drives them to exploit access even after a notice, or get mad at the company in the same way. I'm just speculating. Again, there are companies and positions in companies where its a no brainer that access is revoked for security reasons.

Remaining vacation days should cover the better part of one month alone. If you don't want them to come in for whatever reason, you can send them on paid leave.

Most companies stop having "legitimate security reasons" when the alternative is to pay people for doing nothing. Turns out the fact that actual sabotage and theft of trade secrets is illegal (and often represents a breach of the employment contract, which can incur hefty fines) is a sufficient deterrent for most industries.

My company’s been through multiple rounds of large layoffs. This was standard SOP.

People on immigration visas were not given traditional severances. They were simply kept on the books for that period of time without having any access to any resources and/or being expected to do any work.

I’m not entirely sure what happened if they started a job before the period ended. Whether they got the rest of the money as severance or forfeited it but I doubt they really cared.

> I do agree, but I guess I'm not sure what the solution is here?

The solution is obvious: Stop clinging to this backward butts-in-seats culture that has people move to a new location even if the job they're going to do can easily be done from anywhere in the world.

I mean, that’s simply not true. At a most basic level, if you’re going to collaborate effectively as part of a team for a long period of time then you need to realistically be ± 3 time zones at most.

That's only true if you're working entirely or mostly synchronously, which might be an indicator of inherent anti-patterns in your work culture and processes, e.g., lots of meetings instead of written documentation.

The problem with this approach is that reality is the opposite.

Good/best practices are rarely followed, maybe 20% of practitioners actually follow them in any field.

So that means that on a daily basis, about 80% of people need to work in those "broken" environments.

Still, it's the environment that is broken. Hence, it's the environment that needs to fixed.

Having people relocate to another country, because your organization isn't able to fix its own internal problems, means you're simply outsourcing your own costs to your employees.

That's not how reality works, though.

And except for a select few, most people can't bend reality.

George Bernard Shaw comes to mind here: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Reality being as it is, is no argument for not trying to be better or improve a situation:

Contrary to the Shaw quote above I’d say that simply resigning oneself to reality as it is and therefore precluding better approaches is the unreasonable choice.

Like pair programming?

While in most organizations pair programming probably is far less common than pointless meetings, even then it's preferable to document the outcomes of pair programming sessions, so others can benefit from those results without having to have been there synchronously or in person.

works flawlessly remotely nowadays

Some people don't want to be alone, interacting with a JIRA queue their whole life. I miss coffee with coworkers. I miss being human at work.

You can be human in a distributed setting, too.

There are all sorts of tools that allow for an asynchronous human connection, e.g., asynchronous video recordings.

Working mostly asynchronously also doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional synchronous online meeting (including coffee) as well.

I guess you don’t have any junior engineers?

This question seems to imply that junior engineers require lots of synchronous, in-person meetings and handholding.

Is there any proof that's truly the case? Or isn't that yet another one of those commonly accepted, yet rarely questioned truisms when it comes to - an often dysfunctional - work culture?

> Is there any proof that's truly the case?

Not the OP but the proof is my own experience in both in-office and remote settings. And everyone is going to go by their own life experiences. If enough people think that remote setting sucks and that junior engineers, along with many other roles, are more effective in person, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that's not the case.

Well, there are entirely distributed, remote-first companies like Automattic, Zapier, GitLab, or Basecamp. I'm certain each of those also employs junior engineers.

Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case:

Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?

Or is it rather that the company in question itself has an underlying organizational problem?

> Well, there are entirely distributed, remote-first companies like Automattic, Zapier, GitLab, or Basecamp. I'm certain each of those also employs junior engineers.

Yes. My company is also in that category. We employ a lot of junior engineers too. >90% of them say they want some in-person interaction because it is hard to ramp up effectively on a complex codebase and a different culture.

> Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case

Because we are all humans and in absence of an in-person presence, we are not able to form trusting deep relationships.

> Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?

countless remote teams have faced this problem. it's a trade-off, of course, but it's not an insurmountable challenge.

for example we are using gather.town. much better than Google Meet (full HD screen sharing, ad-hoc breakout sessions, blablabla, free under team size of 25, if I remember correctly)

No problem being remote with juniors, bigger problem being remote and greater than 3 time zones away from your juniors.

It seems you are working in a very niche area where most of the work is entirely asynchronous. In my area of work (non-trivial software development), there is a wide consensus that some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis. My company has fully embraced remote work, is going through an economic down turn like many other "growth startups" and yet finds it necessary to mandate meeting hours where everyone has to be present or to organize offsites where people can meet and get to know each other in a better way.

> some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis

I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.

That said, poster child remote-first companies such as Basecamp, GitLab, or Zapier have their people gather a few times throughout the year, too, to allow them to get to know each other better. That's not a contradiction at all and something entirely different than mandating people move to specific location to work there the entire time.

> I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.

I'd say burden of proof is on you to provide any data that remote work is equally good.

I have given remote-working a shot for three years - first ~1.5 were mandatory during COVID and last ~1.5 were during normal times. My company has gone all in on remote work and has tried to make it work. It just doesn't work and everyone is openly admitting its flaws. To name a few: a lack of trust, very shallow relationships, struggles for junior and new team members to ramp up, a lack of engagement etc.

Based on my personal experience and that of my social and professional circles, >80% people seem to prefer a hybrid model where they work 2-3 days in office and 2-3 days at home. Of course, in-office days have to be mandated for the entire team to be effective.

that's much easier to change than physical location.

> Do you keep them for 3 months just to be nice then proceed with the layoff anyway? I'm not sure that's much better...

Much better than days of notice.

The solutions seem pretty simple to me, contractually required notice periods. My last job I had either a two or three month notice period, I can't quite remember. For those coming over on visas, you could have an initial notice period that's longer.

> I think maybe the best thing to do here is just to give good severance packages?

Missing in this for the case of visas is about how long you're allowed to stay in the country without a job. A notice period should mean you're still employed, so that adds to any grace period around a visa.

> You'd inevitably just end up protecting certain types of crappy situations (recently located) over other types of crappy situations (family member just died).

Maybe, yeah. But protecting some people rather than none is an improvement, particularly when some cases are extremely easy to identify and may make a much larger proportion of people affected significantly.

> required notice periods

But that’s socialism! Soon after, we’ll be eating our own dogs, who wants that?

/s

> I'm not sure what the solution is here?

> Maybe I'm missing something here.

Maybe look at how it's done in pretty much every other developed country in the world? Employees have notice periods and extra safety margins around visas.

(Of course not in USA)

30 days (the EU standard) are not really that much more than the usual 14 days in the US.

30 days is in no way "the EU standard" and it's not even the minimum. In various countries the minimum can be longer than 30 days.

More importantly, the average de-facto "standard" in many contracts is longer.

Additionally, many companies go beyond the contract requirements.

hm. in Hungary there's a trial period, 6 months (used to be 3), and both parties can terminate the employment without cause immediately during this

I think this works on two levels. Yes, pay good severance packages which includes keep paying for the benefits. And in addition find them another sponsor. The sponsor thing is what is different for immigrants from all the other situations you mentioned. This should also be up to the government. When you get fired you shouldn’t outright lose your permit.

Who sells everything instantly when moving to a new job? What if it won't work out?

I think for a few months the company should subsidize renting a place, so new hires who move are not forced to liquidate everything back home. (Relocation packages are a thing after all.)