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Meta faces ‘morale crisis’ as top execs work from other countries during layoffs
- boomboomsubban 4y agoAnother post on the same topic from three days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537813
- withinboredom 4y agoLOL, someone should bust those execs for working without a work visa.
- madsbuch 4y agoI can't see mentioned anywhere, that they are working without visa? Where do you see that?
- withinboredom 4y agoI highly doubt those remote workers are citizens of whatever country they’re remote working in or that Facebook/Meta relocated them there to a local branch. It’s generally nearly impossible (some countries have a remote work visa) to get a work visa if the company you work for doesn’t have an office in the country.
- basisword 4y agoVaries but you generally only need a work visa to work for a local company. Otherwise you can work under a tourist visa.
- withinboredom 4y agoI guess that’s true until you get caught or a disgruntled employee calls the local immigration office. Worse is that not only is the employee charged with fraud and tax evasion (because that’s what they’re doing) but the company can be sanctioned as well.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoIf an employee simply picks up and starts doing their job from another country, they will almost certainly be still paying all the same taxes they usually pay in the country where their job is located. To relieve yourself of that tax burden requires a significant restructuring of your employment, tax residency in a new country, and most likely a double taxation treaty with your home country. Even then, if you were a US citizen, moving to a lower tax jurisdiction is unlikely to provide any significant tax advantages due to the way the US taxes global income regardless of where you live/earn your income.
- withinboredom 4y agoIt doesn’t matter where your job is located. It matters where you currently ARE and the laws OF WHERE YOU ARE. You pay income taxes in the country you reside and make income in, not the country of the business that paid you (in most countries). The US is unique in that you must file income taxes if you work even a few hours for a business meeting (ask me how I found out — the fines aren’t pretty). Tax laws are ridiculous everywhere, but one thing is for sure, they want that income tax if they can get it. Especially because in EU countries (for most tech worker US salaries), a large portion would be taxed at >40%.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoThis isn’t how it works at all. If you spend less than 183 days/year in a country, you typically won’t have tax residency there. It’s quite normal for countries to tax locally sourced income, regardless of tax residency status. But a remote worker isn’t going to have any locally sourced income. Even if you do get tax residency in a new country, there are many cases where that wouldn’t entitle them to tax a remote worker’s income anyway. For instance if you had tax residency in a new country, and tax residency at home at the same time, and there was a double taxation between the two countries, your home country would likely retain the exclusively right to tax you for all or most of that income.
- 4y ago
- pavlov 4y agoThat’s not true for most countries. Tourist visas are not for any kind of work. Business visas permit attending meetings and conducting business activities to benefit a company in the traveller’s origin country, but in general there has to be a connection to the country issuing the visa — “I just want to live there for three months” isn’t a business purpose.
- basisword 4y agoMaybe it’s different when working for a company, but I’ve been self employed + worked in a foreign country under a tourist visa for 5 months. On arrival I was taken to an interview room for 5 mins to explain how I would fund my trip, explained I ran my own business working online, and once I confirmed I would not be working for a local company while there they were perfectly happy.
- pavlov 4y agoYou need to know the local rules. If you enter the USA with a tourist visa or visa waiver (like ESTA), and tell the immigration officer that this is what you’ll be doing in the country, you’ll most likely be sent back. Foreigners need work authorization in the US to earn any kind of income — no matter if it’s paid abroad — unless the work is within the narrow categories of permitted activities under a business visa.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoI don’t know of any temporary entry visas that prohibits you from doing online work while you’re visiting. Most of them even permit you to do in-person work for local clients to some extent. People who travel constantly doing remote work on VOAs isn’t anything new, it’s just more accessible now than it used to be. I’d be very interested in seeing any case law references you have to support this novel interpretation that you’ve come up with.
- pavlov 4y agoIt’s not hard to come up with examples. For example the United States explicitly prohibits you from doing remote work: ”[…] any noncitizen who earns an income in the US must have proper work authorization from the United States government. Working while physically present in the US, even for a foreign employer and even if any earnings are paid into a foreign bank account, will still be classed as work.“ https://www.nnuimmigration.com/can-you-work-remotely-from-us/ https://www.nnuimmigration.com/can-you-work-remotely-from-us...
- davidguetta 4y agoIts all about power. Expecting more than the contract you signed (which is usually a bad deal) when you are an employee is going to lead inevitably to frustration. "Oh but if we are many to complain thigs may change". Well except that you can also be mass fired, especially in tech where the consensus is that most FAANG are way overstaffed with bullshit jobs
- GalenErso 4y agoAll the anonymous posts on HN, Blind and Reddit about how SWEs only perform 10 hours of real work a week with a full salary must have made their way up the chain of command.
- kibwen 4y agoThe executives have known about this for a while; rather, the delay is because they only perform 1 hour of real work a week.
- baby 4y agoDepends on the team. This is true in all companies
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoAnonymous posts are one thing, but the popular "day in the life of a [Facebook/Google] program manager" short videos were something else entirely. That entire genre was incredibly damning. I'll try to look up the link later, but I'd swear that one of them goes something like this, and some of you guys probably know what I'm talking about: Lady shows up with her dog. Grabs a bunch of free snacks. Grabs a free smoothie. Hits the "funfetti room" with her laptop for a zoom meeting. Grabs an enormous seafood lunch at the (free) company canteen. Goes for a walk with her dog. Grabs another free snack and/or a smoothie. Goes home. Just another generic "day in the life."
- wunderland 4y agoMany of those posts were made by recruiters! They were ads for the company.
- expertentipp 4y agoHave they all finally figured out how to transverse unbalanaced binary tree or not? Because they keep on asking how to do it.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoI wonder if anyone at these software companies ever had to actually do these things in practice.
- taftster 4y agoAbsolutely never. OK, maybe once or twice, down at the very low level of some custom distributed database or event messaging system. Everyone else uses the already established defacto standard library from $language.
- KyeRussell 4y agoPeople who want to work for Meta enough to care about their hiring practices don’t really come out looking crash hot themselves.
- rvz 4y agoHang on a minute... Now the NY Post is a good source here, as long as it is bad news about Meta and contributes to the 'Meta is dying' narrative thanks to the layoffs? Very surprising. I think the sentiment suggests that lots here have been scared to buy Meta stock when it crashed to $88. It's very important to disregard the news or predictions of immediate implosions of companies, or headlines of high sensationalism due to over-emotional events like layoffs and euphoric hype that manipulate human psychology. We'll see how Meta does, but declaring it 'dead' or even 'dying' is nothing more than a great exaggeration.
- badkitty99 4y ago[dead]
- fmajid 4y agoIt looks like a straight plagiarism of this NYT story from the day before: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/technology/meta-layoffs-employees-management.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/technology/meta-layoffs-e...
- osigurdson 4y agoI don't see any inconsistency here. The Metaverse strategy is about using special glasses to do anything from anywhere.
- baby 4y agoAs usually with these kind of posts, what’s happening inside the company (which is composed of many divisions and geographic locations, etc.) and what people perceive from the outside are two completely different things. I would not take this article at face value. There’s been such an article every month since the 2016 elections. They are useless, don’t lead to any interesting discussions on HN, yet people continue to upvote them to the FO because “hurr durr facebook is evil”
- tester756 4y agoExactly News medias talk about companies that hire 100 000s people, across 10s of countries, cultures, etc, etc and then write their stories basing on opinion of 4 random employees
- chank 4y agoA lot of large companies stage senior execs in places to simply say they have business presence for tax purposes. Just look at any company that has a bunch of top execs in Switzerland but don't actually make anything there.
- cudgy 4y agoDo they have to be top execs to have a presence?
- chank 4y agoI'm not sure of the exact qualifications, but some senior business owner typically needs to be included. I believe there is a headcount requirement as well, but no requirements on what that headcount does. Most large companies have zero issues meeting the requirements. For a small business/startup it's likely not worth it.
- sys_64738 4y agoI initially read "morale crisis" as "moral crisis".
- tonetheman 4y ago[dead]
- osigurdson 4y agoWhat is implied here is remote execs are not engaged / lazy. This is particularly unfair because the company is doing doing poorly and engaged in layoffs. The argument is essentially everything would be better even if everything is exactly the same (same number of layoffs, etc) except the work location. It doesn't hold.
- tough 4y agoSounds like they're coming on the next wave and they're just paving the way?
- tipsydoo 4y agoThat's a bit of a leap. The argument is that the pain should be felt at the top as well as the bottom, as a function of the state of the company. The least execs could do is try to appear as if they're working to keep people's livelihoods intact. They could signal this in a number of ways, but it's a matter beyond an irrational sense of fairness; if the execs don't have to sacrifice anything at all, is the company really in such dire straits that employment has to be disrupted for the most vulnerable parts of the org?
- osigurdson 4y agoI do agree that large scale layoffs should always include execs. Not even from a moral standpoint, but just from a logical one. Execs have the greatest ability to shape a company and are therefore most responsible when things go wrong. After all, how likely is an exec than runs a company into the ground likely to successfully manage a turnaround? Of course, if a company’s execs control the company (have majority shares) then they can do whatever the hell they want - including firing everybody and running the company into the ground if they feel like it.