For most foreign workers in the US, getting hired by Google feels like the finish line. For one software engineer, it turned out to be the start of the most stressful two months of his career.
Gu Yichen, a 31-year-old Chinese national, joined Google in late 2022 after leaving Amazon, where he had worked since 2017. It seemed like the right move at the time. Tech companies were hiring aggressively, the pay was good, and the interview process had gone smoothly. Even though his manager at Amazon had warned him that the market looked shaky, Yichen decided to take the offer while it was on the table.
He started work around Christmas. Barely a few weeks later, in January 2023, the layoff notice arrived.
“I had started work around Christmas, and the layoff notice came in January 2023. I didn’t do a single day of real work,” Yichen told Business Insider, describing how quickly things fell apart.
Google had planned to put his team on an experimental project. But as the company began cutting costs, the project was scrapped, and the entire team was let go before it ever really started. Yichen wasn’t fired for poor performance or a bad interview. He simply never got the chance to work.
The 60-day countdown
For H-1B visa holders, losing a job means more than losing an income. It starts with a strict 60-day clock. Within that window, a worker has to find a new employer willing to sponsor their visa, switch to a different visa category, or leave the United States entirely. There is very little room for delay.
Yichen tried to stay within Google itself first, reaching out to old contacts to check for internal openings. Nothing suitable came up. To make things harder, layoffs were spreading across the tech industry at the same time, which meant the job market he was searching for had gotten tougher in just the few weeks since he had switched jobs.
Rather than grabbing the first available role just to stay in the country, Yichen made an unusual choice. He decided to fly back to China for a short break, spending time in his hometown of Nanjing before travelling to Yunnan province.
It was a risk, but it worked out. His former colleagues at Amazon reached out about an opening on his old team. Because he was rejoining a company that had already sponsored him before, the immigration paperwork was simpler. Amazon could rely on his previously approved employment-based filings instead of starting the process from scratch.
Today, Yichen is back at Amazon, working out of Sunnyvale, California. He has since applied for a US green card. Looking back, he says the experience taught him that success in tech careers often comes down to timing as much as skill or effort.
Not just one man’s story
Yichen’s experience reflects a much wider pattern. In recent months, large numbers of H-1B workers, including many Indian professionals, have found themselves racing against the same 60-day deadline after sudden layoffs.
According to a report by the Economic Times published in May 2026, job cuts at companies including Meta, Amazon, and Oracle have left thousands of skilled foreign workers scrambling to find new sponsors before their grace period runs out. Those who cannot are expected to leave the country.
The same report notes that many laid-off workers have been trying to buy extra time by switching to B-2 visitor visas. However, immigration lawyers say this route has become harder to rely on, with a noticeable rise in additional document requests and outright visa denials.
This pressure falls especially heavily on Indian professionals, who make up the largest share of H-1B holders by far. Data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security for FY25 shows that Indians received 283,772 of the 406,348 approved H-1B petitions that year. That is roughly seven out of every ten approvals, which shows just how much the Indian tech workforce depends on this single visa category to build a life and career in the US.
For workers like Yichen, a single layoff notice can undo months of planning and years of career progress within weeks. His story ended on a relatively lucky note, with a return to his old team and a shot at a green card. But for many others caught in the same situation, especially amid the current wave of tech layoffs, the outcome is far less certain, and the 60-day clock keeps ticking regardless.
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