It’s often a personal crisis that reveals whether you’re in a great workplace, a good one or a bad one. Unfortunately, Prayut Jain saw the ugly side of startup culture at a time his father was fighting for life in a hospital in India. Jain, one of the founding engineers of a San Francisco-based startup, alleged that he was fired from his job days after he flew back home to meet his father. To make matters worse, the US-based AI engineer faces the risk of losing his H-1B visa if he does not find a new role. You can read more about Jain’s experience here.
Here’s a company, an Indian one, that got it right
A Coimbatore-based company gave a woman a month off after her father’s death, according to an X post by her brother. “My sister works for a traditional company that was built out of Coimbatore. The chairman personally messaged to check in on her,” Vibin Babuurajan wrote.
Apart from the four-week leave, the company bore 20 per cent of the father’s medical expenses, he said.
While empathy and consideration by an employer are what truly matter, a simple vending machine, too, can sometimes be a workplace win.
Google employees vlogging their 9-to-5 - what they eat at work, the perks they get by virtue of being employed by the tech giant - have become common content on the internet. Diksha Aggarwal, a Google employee in Bengaluru, shared a small yet thoughtful gesture that the company makes whenever employees need earphones for work. Aggarwal, who had forgotten to bring her headphones to work one day, simply walked up to a vending machine which dispenses earphones. As with most Google content on Instagram, several users jokingly asked how they could land a job there. Read the full story here.
Most-read this week
The story of Sohan Sethi, a data analytics and AI professional, is one that our readers lapped up this week. In an as-told-to essay published in Business Insider, the 29-year-old shared details about how he managed to live and work in the US despite his H-1B visa application being rejected thrice. Sethi said he spent ₹12.4 lakh to secure “another way” to stay in the US.
