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?
In other words, I'm pretty sure they all have better things to do.
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.
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is that strategies and systems change pretty frequently, so in that time whatever knowledge that employee has, becomes outdated.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.
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
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.
Some firms like Jane Street and Old Mission have no non-competes.
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.
Could you expand on that?
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.
Wikipedia's got a better and more thorough definition than what I tried to write: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave
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.
How so? How is “working full time”, or whatever the eligibility criterion defined, legally? Not the employment agreement?
Do you actually know this stuff or you just speculating?
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.
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.