| The goal of these work visas is to hire someone with specialized skills to do work when the company can't find someone with the necessary skills locally. From a quick skim through the DoJ briefing, the argument which the DoJ makes is that Facebook knows that they have more power over employees that depend on them for work visas, and games the system by creating special job listings that only the applicant seeking a visa would know about and apply for. On an intellectual level, I guess the distinction is in how you define "highly skilled" workers. Are all software engineers considered highly skilled? Or is there a distinction between a general engineer and someone who has experience and expertise in a specific subfield such as mobile development or infrastructure? My way of thinking about it is with the latter. I would think that the DoJ is not happy with the idea of Facebook jumping through a bunch of hoops (mentioned as making positions invisible on their career site and requiring an application via physical mail while rejecting any U.S. candidates) to guarantee a work visa for someone to do specialized work that the company supposedly couldn't find any qualified Americans for when the person they hired doesn't even know what type of work they'll be doing or what team they'll be joining until after they go through 5-10 weeks of bootcamp, and which may end up not even aligning with their specialization. Given that new hire engineers at Facebook sign an offer letter and are officially employed while they go through bootcamp before the whole team matching process, I don't think it's possible for someone to not get matched to a team, at worst they would get assigned to a random team with headcount at some point, which would really raise the chances of that person not working in their specialty. If this assumption is true, the DoJ would definitely not be happy that Facebook was supposedly not able to find a qualified citizen/green card holder to do this job, but the new hire on a visa may not be qualified to do it either and there were most likely citizens/green card holders applicants who actually do have experience in that area of work. Sorry if this is a bit ramble-y, I'm fairly new to HN. |
The interesting thing is how difficult it is to understand the specific goal(s) of legislation. It depends on who you ask.