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Comment by chitowneats | Hacker News Reader

> Most stayed because of visa issues

I keep seeing people repeat this. Where is this factoid coming from? I'm left to assume it's subtle racism stemming from a photo Elon took with some Asian (many likely Asian-American?!?) guys at the office.

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I am an immigrant myself. So I understand the pain of uprooting yourself and moving to another country. I put myself in the shoes of Twitter staff. That ultimatum by Musk of Twitter 2.0 would simply had me quit. As did many engineers. But if my visa status was tied to the job, I would had stayed. Simply to get some more time in landing another job if nothing else.

I agree that there could be people caught in this situation. I feel for them and I want this system to be improved.

However, people are claiming that no engineer in their right mind would stay there if not in that situation. It turns out Twitter has had less than 700 H1-B approvals since 2009:

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/Noahpinion/status/159464174641...

Basic arithmetic to determine there are at least hundreds of American engineers working at Twitter right now.

People. I get it. You don't like Elon. You find this type of work environment toxic. Not everyone is like you though!

In fact, at least a few of us are applying to work there as we speak.

Just as a thought exercise: What are you going to say 3 years from now when a hiring manager asks why you willingly chose to start working for someone who had just wantonly admitted that he intended to be abusive to his staff and force them to work nights and weekends for a venture that he was actively undermining? Is this representative of the judgment you use on a regular basis, and if it is why should that manager trust you near their area of responsibility?

Definitely just a thought exercise. In no universe would a hiring manager ever ask this.

"Why did you sacrifice other things in your life to work at a large tech company, operating at scale, for a high salary?"

Edit: Absolutely laughable that you think this will be detrimental to people's careers. Your other comments on this topic are frankly unhinged. If you are indeed a hiring manager planning on factoring this in to your criteria, please know this will be a massive red flag to productive engineers.

It's detrimental to all of our careers that this is the example being set for "how engineers should be treated". I'm not your enemy here: if you get hurt and taken for a ride, that effects me because we're in the same market. Knocking the bottom out of the market is bad for all of us. I wish you wouldn't throw yourself into the grinder and help it along, but I hope things work out for you either way.

You're not my enemy, sure. But I'm not interested in working with coddled and entitled individuals who are half checked out, self-important, have a warped perspective on life and humanity, etc. I end up having to pick up the slack. No thanks.

Musk absolutely smashed that culture at Twitter. It will be rough seas for a while but the company will emerge stronger. Maybe even profitable!

I doubt the majority of them are visa holders, but twitter sponsors h1-b staff, and it's incredibly difficult (logistically and emotionally) to move jobs or do anything visa-wise.

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