This essay as told is based on a conversation with Gu Yichen, a 31-year-old Chinese national living in California. After being laid off by Google, he returned to Amazon, where he works on an H-1B visa.

His words have been edited for length and clarity.

I spent my sophomore year of high school as an exchange student in Yacolt, a small town in Washington state.

I didn’t realize that participating in the program would lead me to skip the Chinese entrance exam and put me on the path to studying abroad to obtain my bachelor’s degree.

I also hadn’t realized that it would eventually lead me to building a career in the United States.

Get the H-1B lottery

I majored in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

At the time I was focused on circuit boards and chips, but I was more interested in the computing side, because the results were more tangible and visible.

During my junior year, I interned at Amazon. After graduating, in 2017, I started my first full-time job in that same team, while on an OPT visa.

Having a STEM degree gave me three opportunities to participate in the H-1B lottery. I was lucky on my third try. I had to return to China to get my visa, and due to COVID, I ended up working remotely for Amazon for a year.

Abruptly fired

I successfully applied for a job at Google in late 2022. Companies were hiring aggressively, interviews were relatively easy, and compensation packages were huge.

My manager at Amazon tried to convince me to stay, saying that things were unstable and the future was uncertain. I felt that if I didn’t take risks when I was young, I would be less likely to do so later.

Human resources assured us in orientation that there would be no layoffs.

My team had planned to work on an experimental project. Due to cost-cutting, the entire team was shelved and laid off.

I started working around Christmas and the layoff notice came in January 2023. I didn’t do a single day of actual work. My ex manager was right.

Slow life in Yunnan

I reached out to friends at Google to see if their teams had any openings, but couldn’t find anything.

There was also a time crunch because I was on an H-1B visa: within a 60-day grace period, I had to find a job, get sponsorship transferred, and start working. It was tight.

I felt like companies were laying off people everywhere. If I applied, I would probably end up in an interim position that I didn’t see myself in long term.

Instead, I decided to take a break. I returned to my hometown, Nanjing, for a while and then traveled to Yunnan province in southwest China to stay with my aunt.

Return to the USA

I’m not the type who can rest for a long time. I hoped that, as a Google student, I would be rehired. If a position were available within six months of my departure, I would not have to go through the interview process again.

I also stayed in touch with colleagues from my old team at Amazon. They told me a position had opened up.

I could continue using my previous H-1B application instead of starting from scratch. If you were to switch to a new team or company, you would have to restart the app, which has become more difficult in recent years.

Because I returned to the same team at Amazon in Sunnyvale, California, last year, recent changes to the H-1B visa under the Trump administration have not affected me.

I applied for a green card and once my I-140 is approved, a key approval in the process, I can renew my H-1B indefinitely. It will give me more freedom in both my personal life and my career. In the future, I might start my own business or take cooking lessons.

The work environment in the US seems more suitable to me. As long as you get the job done, no one cares if you work day or night. There is no drama.

My experience at Google made me realize that while I prefer to work on experimental projects, companies tend to prioritize essential teams and mature products over exploratory projects.

It also taught me that landing the ideal job often depends on both time and effort. I became more flexible once I realized how much was out of my control.