Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times | Hacker News Reader

Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times

careerfair.io

63 pointsshsachdev79 comments

Wow this article went into zero depth about the struggles of his application process. I could've just read the titlebait. I think the title misrepresents what the article is about.

Commenting on the title -- how many extremely poor visa applications are rejected correctly though? Is the process expected to be absolutely perfect? Are 100 valid rejections and 1 invalid rejection worth not being able to reject any applicants at all?

FWIW, I'm not saying the process isn't broken. We shouldn't be consistently rejecting a brilliant application -- it hints that the process has some severe flaws. Perhaps it should be easier for the process to "forget" someone.

It is probably just title bait as you said. An 8 time rejection seems extreme to me, usually it gets harder after a rejection by a consular officer, not easier, so my own speculative, possibly needless guess (having gone through my fair share of these across many countries including the US) is that his initial applications failed for bureaucratic reasons (like a missing document), not because it was a consular decision (i.e. the consular refused him and stated a reason for denial).

My visa was rejected twice before I gave up. One of my friend was rejected 3 or 4 times before he was granted a visa, in a span of less than 1 year. I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary to see someone’s visa rejected 8 times before one was granted. The F1 student visa requirements are quite ambiguous and leave a lot of room for “interpretation”. Most are rejected because they cannot demonstrate “strong ties” to the home country to prove they will return after graduation. Now tell me how do a senior in college with no asset and no job prove they will return to the home country after 5 years of graduate school.

It's almost like they are intentional ambiguous so as to deter applicants from even trying. It's pretty basic behavioral/psychological exploitation.

TFA leaves out what the problem is with Cisco that wouldn’t allow him to allow his engineers to improve webex while they all worked for Cisco.

What else aren’t people at Cisco able to achieve because they are at cisco?

I don't know about Cisco specifically, but large companies are plagued with bureaucracy which bogs down engineers from doing what they want to do.

Imagine only the salespeople can set tasks. They set shortsighted tasks which leave no time to actually improve the software fundamentals - always adding new features and abandoning half-baked projects.

This is the way most large companies work their software teams in my experience.

> They set shortsighted tasks which leave no time to actually improve the software fundamentals

Does anyone have anecdotes to share where the software engineers were set free, and they bankrupted the company with irrelevant development?

> large companies are plagued with bureaucracy which bogs down engineers from doing what they want to do.

Are there places where engineers can just do what they want to do (Google?)? What comes out of it? Brilliant architecture? A cluster fuck of features a some devs thought were cool? Awesome spin-off products?

I’ve been told by an ex-Cisco employee of that timeframe that Cisco was full of politics.

The way people who worked there talked reminded me of how IBM people talked when I interned there. It was all about who was the boss of who. Virtually no talk of technical topics. Lots of talk about which organization would be on the chopping block next.

Supposedly their interview process was a joke as well as people got hired into positions without a technical interview.

This article is garbage for so many reasons. The worst offense is using the "don't be afraid to pursue your dreams" nonsense. That line is so old and cliche and that's not even the real takeaway here.

The most important takeaway for all you up-and-coming-CTOs-and-Founders is "Be the type of leader that can bring 40 of your engineers with you to your new company".

40 engineers is staggering. That's an instant engineering org. You start the ground running and you all have a common history and language. I would easily wager that Zoom wouldn't be the company it would be if Yuan wasn't the leader that could attract 40 current workers to his startup.

Agree, and the second takeaway, as cliche as it sounds, is “talk to your customers.”

If you're the VP of engineering for a product, and your product universally sucks (and you're fully aware of how bad it sucks), what's wrong with the company structure that prevents you from fixing it? That's a better question.

That's a rhetorical question, right? In any company, employees don't get to capture any value. In Cisco, even if he turned his unit into a $50 billion business, he would be lucky to get $50 million and a promo to SVP. Even Google's CEO gets "only" 200-400 mils and I suppose that a VP at Cisco is a much smaller role.

Your job in that role is often to ensure your engineers do exactly what they are told. Often it's not to set tasks yourself.

I think if they really don't want you, you should just stop trying so hard to get in. Especially these days when the American dream isn't quite what it used to be anymore. There are always opportunities elsewhere.

Well, for a founder of a $40 bil company, the American dream is real and even got HDR colors.

Your right, in the old days it probably made a large difference to people's lives. I probably should have emphasized it's likely less true today

FTFA:

"After he left, 40 of the 800 engineers he worked with immediately joined him at Zoom.

And according to this tweet, almost all of the others sent in resumes to work with him. He had something like 1000 job inquiries within a week of announcing his leaving.

Talk about engineering loyalty."

No, let's talk about Intellectual property(IP):

How much does Zoom's software differ from Cisco/Webex? If Yuan got 40 developers overnight from Cisco/Webex and more later, how much IP did they bring to Zoom from Cisco/Webex? Should Cisco/Webex sue Zoom for IP theft? I don't see how such a lawsuit could fail.

> How much does Zoom's software differ from Cisco/Webex?

It's been 9 years, so I would guess quite a lot.

> Should Cisco/Webex sue Zoom for IP theft?

I mean they probably could, but this is more of an employee retention problem. If Cisco had not mismanaged the engineering department (And if they had not mismanaged the engineering department, then why did ±1000 engineers decide to leave for a competitor within a week), they would have been able to build the software in the way they seemed to feel they could at Zoom. This is Cisco's fault.

What's the point of having intellectual property if it is very clearly inferior to that of a brand new startup with a lot of the same engineers? How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because you can't do it right?

says>"How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because you can't do it right?"

Let me rephrase that for you (with a mind toward a court case):

" How much is that IP worth if a significant number of your employees decide to leave to work on a product in the same space, because, while working for Cisco/Webex, they worked out all the bugs and now know how to write the software right?"

Nail in the fscking coffin, Dude! Cisco is going to own Zoom (literally and figuratively).

Cisco have had nine years to own Zoom for this IP theft you allege. It's not going to happen.

> because, while working for Cisco/Webex, they worked out all the bugs and now know how to write the software right?

Well they obviously weren't given room by Cisco to fix the bugs, or there wouldn't be any. Or they didn't have room to start afresh amid technical debt.

In any case, I think the developers would probably not be foolish enough to use techniques that they had used at Cisco?

The absence of Cisco winning infringement lawsuits or settlements with Zoom would suggest there was no IP theft.

Many founders split from established companies because the established company disregard or dismiss their product ideas.

An idea is not IP.

WebEx sucked. So this seems to be a silly question.

I read a funny article about a 2 billion dollar Cisco vs. Zoom trial that occurred during the pandemic. It all took place on ZOOM.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/10/06/cisco-fi...

> Keep moving forward and don’t settle. You might be surprised at how many people follow you.

Everyone at a former startup I was also an employee at rejected working with me lol.

But yes, new people did follow my journeys after a lot of my "thought leadership" shitposting on Quora, Twitter, ghostwriting on Forbes... the usual "organic" stuff. It is still funny how that was written in the article, compared to the expressions on my former co-workers faces as they quickly tried to nicely reject me as if I had just grown two heads. This isn't a story about success or redemption or anything, its also what happened and what probably happens more commonly.

Open the border. No reason people born somewhere shouldn't have the same opportunities as people born here beside greed.

Wanting to make a livable wage is not greed.

Besides, unchecked migration would lead not only to seriously depressed wages but also massive social issues.

When it's done by stealing opportunities from the poor it is.

The issue isn't "unchecked" migration and a yes/no checkbox on a "livable" wage, you're making a category error and implying every anti-immigrant trope of the past 150 years. Your comment serves as an attempt to change the subject.

Immigration wasn't a problem until Trump decided it was, rigorous thinker that he is.

Immigration has a direct impact on the labor market. Unlimited migration would likely outpace any sort of economic growth and massively depress wages. I would not look forward to competing with an order of magnitude more candidates for jobs with mediocre pay.

> Your comment serves as an attempt to change the subject

That's funny because you did not refute anything I said and just brought up Trump, whose opinion I couldn't care less about.

Immigration has been limited for many years, and both parties support limits, it’s not a new idea that came from Trump. Personally I support open borders. I do believe it would reduce wages for some locals, but overall the dramatic increase in net welfare would be well worth it. There’s no need to bring up Trump - this view is so far from the Overton window that current political figures are barely relevant.

Not wanting completely open borders isn't "greed" by any definition I'm aware of. It's a fairly normal level of human self interest.

Historically, before the two world wars one could pretty much live and travel anywhere in the world. Passports and visas are a relatively recent invention.

https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...

Sadly, the primary way that the abstract concept of sovereignty is expressed concretely is by erecting and enforcing borders, thus defining who is in (citizen) or out (alien). This power is established, even reinforced, by the arbitrariness that a state can include or exclude aliens on a whim. I can't think of a way to change this for physical borders given the entire world has settled on this system, and it seems more borders are being erected for the digital world too. You'd need to take down the concept of a state with a finite realm of influence to take these borders down.

It is my experience that most people who advocate for open borders do so primarily out of human-rights considerations, yet do not adequately reckon (if even at all) with the national security implications of these policies. The unfortunate fact is that there are hostile nations and organizations whose leaders would happily take every advantage that they can get.

Contemporary events in Syria/Iraq and Ukraine come to mind.

Obviously don' open the border to terrorists. The government is already watching everyone in the world, it wouldnt be that difficult to mark people as security threats.

Yes, because open borders would do wonders for the countries suddenly losing every intelligent citizen worth their salt to the US. Why do so many left leaning social good initiatives tend to hug a tree while the surrounding forest gets fire bombed?

The only people who seriously consider open borders don’t have the slightest idea how desperate 3 billion people around the world are to enter the US.

3 billion Americans is the goal

Agreed, but I would go further: we should immediately issue passports for everyone in the world who submits an online application without prejudice.

There's a great book by Matthew Yglesias called One Billion Americans that discusses how important this is.

Biden, get it done!

If nowhere else opens their borders why should the US?

To get the best and the brightest from other lands to further enrich the US society which is much better primed to be a fully heterogeneous one than most anywhere else on the planet, and that’s just from an economic advancement point of view, not a moralistic one.

For clarity, I’m making no argument for merit based entrance. You don’t know who the best and brightest are when they’re crossing the border, and you don’t know who’s descendants are going to make the world better for you and yours.

The policy that follows from that is "fix our immigration policy that more of the brightest can get in", not "open the border" (which I interpret as allowing anyone to work in the US[1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_border

> You don’t know who the best and brightest are when they’re crossing the border

Not sure how anyone can say stuff like this with a straight face. Of course you know. In fact, we already have programs to get these people into the US on a faster track. There are problems with these programs, like any, that we should improve. Opening the borders to all comers is not a viable option.

Who is suggesting "opening the borders to all comers?" Honest question.

gp poster, I’d love to see it.

Several people in this very thread, including the comment almost directly above yours:

"Agreed, but I would go further: we should immediately issue passports for everyone in the world who submits an online application without prejudice."

Yes, this lunacy is a real idea being discussed on Hacker News. We need to hit a big fat reset button on California, I swear.

Try to get a tourist Visa in Canada. Next try the US. You’ll see a world of difference.

Next compare what it takes to work in Canada vs the US. Also stark differences.

We don’t need 100% open borders, but “open with reasonable security procedures” seems perfectly reasonable.

But then people want to go to US not Canada...

And Canada is.... Canada.

Canada is one of the top destinations for immigrants from all around the world.

> But then people want to go to US not Canada...

What? There are a good 4 billion people that would give up their firstborn to immigrate to Canada.

I don't know the difference, and I'm not being snarky (honest). Is Canada easier or harder?

I wouldn't say easier (this depends on your personal situation). But it is definitely far more sane.

Canada is different, not easier.

Not much difference if you are from Kazakhstan or most of the xUSSR.

Everywhere else should also open borders.

There are plenty of places with far fewer restrictions than the US. And something can be a good idea even if no one else is doing it yet.

Sure. But every country has a process. The OP suggested opening the border as in have 0 restrictions rather than fewer.

Something is a bad idea because it hasn’t been done before?

Maybe since the foundation of nation states, humans have been pondering immigration, and everyone in modern history has it wrong except you?

I must’ve forgot that famous hacker ethos, if it hasn’t been done before don’t bother trying.

As Ukraine how it feels about its border with Russia.

What's wrong with the luck of the draw?

Is greed unacceptable?

What's with the obtuse questions? It's okay and even expected to be somewhat bad, but it's still better to not be bad.

Would you apply the same argument to your front door?

My front door exists as a result of my labor.

Everything nice in the US exists as a result of Americans' labor.

Are you going to send all your money to people more disadvantaged than you? There's no reason they shouldn't have your money beside greed.

Yes I donate around half my income to effective charities every year. Hoping to continually up those numbers.

That's still you exercising your control over your salary. You get to choose how much to donate, and you choose the salaries.

Why not let other people just take what they please from your wallet? That's what you propose for the country you live in, effectively.

I earned the money I have. Citizens didn't earn their citizenship. You're completely misguided too, immigration is in no way akin to "giving people free money." It's very difficult to immigrate. I would love to kick everyone who was born here out and make them reapply with the same process as want to be immigrants.

An excellent policy if you wanted to bring about the destruction of a nation.

> Yuan migrated to the USA from China in the 80s. He had heard Bill Gates speak about the internet

The same Bill Gates who neglected to mention the Internet in "The Road Ahead", published 1995?

It's not obvious to me your point here after reading the Wiki article on the book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Gates_book)#Co...

Thanks, I stand corrected; he did mention the Internet. At that time, he was still expecting a walled-garden AOL-like model to win the day, and Microsoft was frantically trying to build MSN to take that market away from AOL, so he downplayed the WWW and the Internet. The review quotes in the Wikipedia article make it clear how shortsighted that was even with the information available at the time.

As for the original article here --- Yuan may have heard Gates talk inspiringly about the Internet, but certainly not in the 1980s, and only after Gates realized rather late that the Internet was a fait accompli.

You have confirmed GP's point. This link documents that Gates had underestimated the internet when the book was published in 1995.

What I find frustrating about our immigration system is that some people are held to such a higher bar than others.

I know of colleagues who are made to submit hundred page applications to be admitted under talent-related visa programs.

In the meantime, we wave in (or just look the other way) for people who happen to come from countries next door, or because they came in illegally and had a kid.

It makes you think less of the US as an equitable place.

It would be more intellectually honest to have a global lottery. No country-based quotas, no grandfathering in.

Unless the truth is that because of our geography, you simply have to give up and say that we are forever going to have to treat some countries and people differently.

That's systemic racism if I ever saw it.

Different countries of origin are subject to different scrutiny standards based on the demand to immigrate to the US, the amount of fraud or corruption in the origin country, and the level of illegal immigration or overstays from a given country of origin.

It is illegal in the US consider race as a criteria for issuing visas.

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