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Fri, 19 Mar 2010

/xLife/China/Beijing/OpenSource: Strange Goings On at Novell

I do not normally blog about employment negotiations, but this was a strange one. I shake my head every time I think about it....

The story is not very complicated: The Beijing office of Novell posted a job opening on a local website. I responded. There was an interview, which seemed to go well enough. A couple weeks later I received a phone call followed by an e-mail, with an offer. And here is where things go a little off the rails....

Normally one would expect an offer, especially from a big company, to be, well, SOLID. Ie. at that point, if I accept the terms of the offer, the job is mine, if perhaps conditional upon a probationary period. Based upon this understanding of the situation, I actually turned down an interview in the following couple of days....

Apparently though, at least in Beijing when dealing with Novell, there is no such "solidity". After I had already accepted the offer, the HR person I was dealing with asked me what kind of visa I had. I told her an 'F' (rather typical, I think, of someone working freelance in China).

"Oh". "You need to have a work permit already." What she is talking about basically is a "Z" visa, which is only held by full-time employees sponsored by their employers. In my current situation, which was no secret to anyone, my holding a Z visa was quite an unreasonable assumption. And then she just kind of casually brushed away her previous offer, like it never existed.

As any foreigner who lives in Beijing knows, the silliest part of this exchange is making a big deal about any kind of a Visa in Beijing. Getting them is fairly trivial. Even little hole-in-the-wall English schools seem to be able to get their employees Z visas, and I certainly do not have any problems renewing my F (normally....)

So I am left contemplating three probable explanations for all of the above:

I do not know what I am talking about (a possibility that must always be remembered) and a Visa, for some reason, really *is* a big problem for Novell. Then of course, this should have been screened up front and saved all of us from wasting a lot of time with interviews, etc.
The visa is not a problem, but Novell's HR thinks it is, and is giving bad advice to senior management. That one kind of speaks for itself.
The visa is not a problem, but rather a convenient (and transparently silly) excuse to retract the offer due to other, undisclosed reasons.

I tend to lean toward the last explanation. But none of the above leaves me much inclined to waste my time replying to another Novell job posting.

posted at: 13:57 | path: /xLife/China/Beijing/OpenSource | permanent link to this entry

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Fri, 19 Mar 2010