Facebook hires software engineers from India to fill US posts

[beerandjesus]

14. I wish.

Federal law, no. It's perfectly legal to fire all your employees and replace them with Indians working for 1/3 the salary.

In California, you have to at least show something resembling an attempt to hire an American for a position before you bring someone in on an H1B. As you can imagine, it doesn't take much. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of the last 18 years, and I can tell you first hand that I saw many consulting shops which were obviously visa mills. Needless to say, the workers (who were almost always Indian) worked insane hours for pathetic pay--and sometimes even lived in company housing.

The visa racket is not new. What's new is that Facebook is doing this so openly: I'm inclined to think this is some sort of lobbying effort, since big tech companies regularly lobby the federal government to increase the size of the visa pool.

But make no mistake about it, this is about keeping American pay as low as possible. There are lots of great people with outstanding technical skills in the Bay Area--and a lot of them are looking for jobs. The big companies are manipulating the market.