Heart breaking story, really (from a heavy Kubernetes user btw).
Would you mind giving more details about what happened exactly? Why did you have to go back? What was the reason why they didn't renew your visa (I'm assuming it's a renewal problem since you mentioned 3 years)? And is there something that is being done by your company or yourself to get your US life back, or you just "gave up"?
I mean why the hell would a person with a 250k+ offer be kicked out, assuming you didn't commit any crime? Isn't the offer itself a proof that you're desperately wanted here and it should invalidate any RFE?
Sure! It is not about renewal, it hit at a different time.
TD;LR (if I remember the details correctly among all the overall bs):
- Changed work location,
- Company notified immigration and joined a check to the amendment,
- Immigration returned the notice because they claimed they did not need such check,
- Company re-submitted the amendment right after, and proved by the way government indeed required a check at the time of submission but might have changed conditions,
- Immigration submitted both a RFE and a NOIR within two days intervals (pretty unfair already imho) claiming H1B petition was violated because government figured (tax filing and flight records) I moved and company failed to tell immigration in due time,
- Company argued that they did indeed notify immigration promptly but that they discarded the initial amendment due to the check,
- Immigration decided to ignore completely and revoke H-1B regardless.
Documented personal achievements and publicized projects should have been way enough to convince any legit immigration officer that my contribution to the country was strictly positive. My personal thoughts? They only care about sending these filthy foreigners back to where they come from (as opposed to 'home'), and they take any covert opportunities to do so.
Company did fill a new petition, but attorneys highly doubt that I am still counted towards the cap. We will have an answer in a few days. Otherwise, we would have to wait a year for the next lottery, at best.
Truly sad and rather stressful event for my wife and I anyways. And she is currently 'stuck' in her PhD (few years to go). Also, because it's been a few years I have not been to the country where I hold nationality, I am treated as a non-resident expat and several rights (such as health insurance, bringing my foreigner wife on a VISA, etc), at least for now. To regain access to these, I would need to stay here for a while, rent a place and find a job.
And finally, the cherry on the 'deportation' cake: company did not tell me about any of these (back and forth took a few months..) until I found out myself just two weeks before immigration took final decision of kicking me out. Might have been a blessing in disguise though.
Thanks for your detailed explanation. It’s so horrible. I wonder how long it will take for the US system to realize what a big mistake mistreating highly trained stem workers is.
I took on a project in Java (web backend project) a few months ago, first Java experience, I was excited.
After a couple months, the gratuitous (or what felt like gratuitous to me at least) verbosity of the language and all sort of abstractions and intricate relationship of classes/interfaces in libraries (the typical Java programmer mindset) drove me insane. Icing on the cake was the atrocity of frameworks (had to work with a legacy Spring codebase) and the need for using an extremely complicated IDE with a billion options and knobs in order to write any sort of code.
I was incredibly happy when I finished and deeply regretted taking on that work. I didn't think it would have been that bad.
I think if Java was my only option, I'd probably switch to a different non-programming career.
To put things in perspective, I am a C (kernel development)/C++ (system programming)/Go (backend development) programmer usually, working with tmux+vim and respective plugins for lightweight code completion and navigation.
I personally know sales folks in large enterprises (say Cisco) who do a lot of travelling and are able to get base salaries of ~250k and commissions of ~400-500k a year, on top of essentially life time personal unlimited travelling due to millions of miles points accumulated. So yea, pretty high.
Salespeople in the tech space in SF start on about $70k (first year) and can expect to get to $200 (all in) after 5-7 years. Top reps aren't going find it hard to get $250k+ by their early 30s.
I don't know a huge amount about engineering salaries, but my guess is they're actually pretty similar across the board (although engineers start a lot higher).
I've done sales recruiting for about a year. I've only ever talked to one guy who's made more than $1m in a year. He was on a base of $125 or $150k. Last year he made $750k, and the year before that $1m.
But if you're a rep who's truly making $1m+ a year, you probably aren't planning on jumping ship anytime soon.
Haha I hope you're not being serious. If I had to estimate the probability of Google ever blocking my account over my life time I'd say 0.01%, whereas the probability of someone successfully attacking my mail server/dns records/... if I really became a target would be easily 100%.
Oh, I'm completely serious. Random bots attacking my server, sure, but that's not what I meant, the real problem is targeted attacks and spearfishing.
The difference is: I can move my domain, I can move my server to another system, build defenses, if needed, whereas who's gmail address gets blocked or reused (though this latter is more frequent with tumblr and instagram handles), there are no options.
Oh wow that would be really bad (not catastrophic since again I could recover Google with backup codes and from there email recovery for the other accounts).
I heard good things about Authy but I've been a bit cautious to add yet another service (which sounds ironic considering the 430 accounts I originally mentioned) just for what it seems like a simple TOTP client, and I don't need any other fancy feature such as cross-device sharing because of the above mentioned recovery procedure always being available in extreme cases.
Plus I was under the assumption that Authenticator data was backed up via iOS backups or iOS keyring, but I admit I've never tried it so I'm just speculating.
Yes, with Lastpass you can export all your data to a csv that is generated at runtime using your master password. Although, to be honest, why would I need that? Assuming every important service in that list has some sort of MFA via Google authenticator/gmail/google voice number and a recovery option via the gmail address, what would a backup be useful for?
Essentially, the only passwords I really need to memorize in my head are the lastpass and google ones.
The biggest point of failure to me seems some bank account that I tried to recover in incognito mode which apparently just asks social security number plus some other idiotic information instead of relying on sending a recovery email. And there doesn't seem to be any way to change that, beside changing bank that is.
That is a possibility, I might be naive but I consider it on the very unlikely side. What I would imagine in that case is that I would reset the important other accounts such as the bank ones by showing up in some physical office with my passport, or something similar, while waiting to solve the situation with Google.
What alternatives would you suggest? Spreading the accounts over different email addresses? Letting aside the privacy issue, to be honest I don't think there is another mail provider that I'd trust better than Google from a security point of view.
I have seen businesses die because they only had one bank. You and I have both seen, from time to time, people complaining that something went wrong with a Google account with no apparent way to obtain recourse.
Always have a backup. And a contingency plan in case the backup plan fails.
I'm with you on LastPass. I am utterly reliant on it, and it bothers me greatly. I have hedged my bets a bit by backing things up with 1Password. But what a collosal pain in the ass that is. Friction leads to sloth, and sloth leads to system failure.
A simple alternative would be using an existing email address on a domain you own as a POP3 account within GMail. That way you get all the benefit of GMail without being dependent on it in case something at Google goes awry.
You could set up for gmail with a custom domain. That way you get all of the benefits of hosting with google but if they decide to lock your account for some reason you have a back out strategy
The primary value of this site is intellectual curiosity. That's just one kind of curiosity; there are many others. The kind involved in this post is one step removed from comparing body measurements (edit: as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107213 already pointed out). That's crushingly off topic.
