Rohan Patil came to the US from India in 2015 to pursue a postgraduate degree in computer science. Patil was “fascinated by America,” he said, and when he landed a job in machine learning and research at Amazon two years later, he was elated.
“It was great joining Big Tech,” said Patil, who applied for an alias so he could speak candidly. “People at home loved it. The money was great. It was a little surreal to see you earning more than most Americans.”
Eventually, a recruiter from Meta (then Facebook) reached out, and Patil started working for the social media giant in New York in 2019. “I bought into the Meta culture a lot,” Patil said. He liked the fast pace of the company and the impact it had on the lives of billions of people around the world. “We feel invincible,” he said.
At 5 am ET on November 9, an email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Patil’s inbox. Meta was laying off more than 11,000 people, around 13% of its workforce. Patil was not surprised. Reports about the imminent layoffs at Meta had started circulating days before. But at 6 am, Patil received another email. It contained a separation agreement, confirming that he was one of the people to be fired.
“I really couldn’t believe it,” Patil said. Morale in Meta had collapsed since June, when Zuckerberg said he was “turning up the heat” to encourage people to leave the company. But Patil thought that he would be safe because he was a high achiever. “Layoffs were looming,” he said, “but like everyone else at the company, I thought: Not in my backyard!”
Bad news has recently hit the backyards of thousands of tech workers. In 2022, tech companies across the country made some of their biggest cuts yet, thanks to a slowdown in online growth during the pandemic era and a potential economic downturn. More than 140,000 tech workers have lost their jobs so far this year, according to Layoffs.for your information, a tracker created by Roger Lee, a San Francisco-based businessman. Nearly two-thirds of the 45,000 cuts in November were from Meta, Amazon, Twitter and Cisco alone. Other companies, such as Apple and Alphabet, have slowed down or freeze hiring altogether.
For Patil, there was an additional complication: he is in a H-1B work visa. That’s the most common type of visa used by tech companies in the US to hire international workers in fields like IT, where US representation is often low. a recent analysis from Bloomberg’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that companies including Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe and Lyft hired at least 45,000 workers on H-1B visas in the past three years. Because the H-1B visa is tied to the employer, laid-off H-1B holders have 60 days to find a new job or leave the country.
“I was basically screwed,” Patil said.
Now, Patil and thousands of other laid-off visa workers are racing against the clock to find new jobs to avoid having to abruptly 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 its layoffs last month, hundreds of visa workers frantically began composing 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 time instead of being fired after the federally required two-month notice? Being on the payroll longer would give them more time to find something else, the laid-off workers wrote. Many tech companies have frozen hiring, they said, and getting new jobs over the holiday season would be difficult.
“[This] it puts our families, spouses and children in school in a terrible situation,” the employees wrote in a draft of the email read to BuzzFeed News by a former Meta employee. “I hope to get a kind extension to the last day of the notice period at this difficult time for all of us.”
In a WhatsApp group of hundreds of fired Meta employees on work visas, the atmosphere was tense, according to two former employees in the chat who did not want to be named for fear of retaliation from Meta. Some people wanted more colleagues to sign the letter to put pressure on management. Others wanted nothing to do with it so as not to anger senior executives.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the letter or whether Meta considered the request.
Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, desperate posts by panicked H-1B workers from Meta and other companies have gone viral.
“Elon’s Twitter 2.0 team immediately terminated my employment for no reason today before Thanksgiving.” aware Yiwei Zuang, former machine learning engineer at Twitter. “I have an H1B visa and I only have 60 days to start a new job.” Zuang’s post was shared more than 500 times, received almost 15,000 likes and more than 800 comments filled with potential leads and messages of solidarity.
“Consider moving to Vancouver as well,” said one commenter. “As a seasoned engineer, you can comfortably get a permanent residence upon landing and never worry about fucking H1B again.”
Other LinkedIn users posted about the difficulty of finding a new job in the current climate. “60 days is not long enough for most people to find work in a recession-induced economy and holiday season,” a software engineer wrote on your own page. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of people and their families will have to leave the country and start their lives anew. Parents and their children could be separated. Years of hard work and personal sacrifices, working in the US would amount to nothing.”
