Is it possible that they are collecting resumes online but never hiring or interviewing the candidates? The resumes would be used as evidence that they tried to hire Americans but didn't consider any of the applicants to be qualified. This evidence was used to file visa applications.

I've seen this done for less nefarious reasons, whereby a company will keep advertising for positions, but just not hire anyone. This is because not advertising jobs is a strong negative signal that business is in trouble.

And plenty of places will find a budget, even if there isn't one ordinarily, for an extraordinary candidate.

But, as was pointed out above, this isn't a money-saving exercise, this is giving up on a field.

Maybe they just let go of whoever was keeping that page up to date.

That's a pretty incriminating statement, do you have any proof?

Removed, thanks. Don't want to land in hot water.

And these folks will probably have a chance to switch; IIRC something similar happened during Firefox OS (I'm not sure.)

In Mozilla you usually get hired for a specific position; programmers (or anyone, really) aren't liquid resources to be moved around randomly between teams. Larger companies have enough going on that if a project is shut down there's usually some other project to shift to that works for both the team and the programmer. Mozilla only has a thousand employees, so there will be very few openings to choose from based on your experience level, field, and interests.

From the original CNet article:

> Some affected employees are getting new roles in Mozilla, but those losing jobs get severance and job-hunting benefits, Mozilla said. Although about 50 people are affected by the cut, some might stay at Mozilla since they can apply for new positions, some of which Mozilla opened early to ease the pain of the layoffs.

Also, from the CNet article:

> "We have shifted our internal approach to the internet-of-things opportunity," Mozilla said in a statement, "to step back from a focus on launching and scaling commercial products to one focused on research and advanced development, dissolving our connected devices initiative and incorporating our internet-of-things explorations into an increased focus on emerging technologies."

The "layoffs" aren't because of money reasons, it's just a project being shut down.

The people affected by this closure will have the opportunity to apply for these jobs.

You also need to publicly post job listings for PERM labor certification (for green card) and LCA (for H-1b petition). They probably have employees that want to move off whatever visa they are on (typically H-1b to green card, or STEM to H-1b).

afaik job postings are aimed at a specific team, have a hiring manager and a few engineers for phone screening and interviews assigned. There is even a system for tracking candidates, and an effort to blind screener for bias.

So spare me the baseless accusations. ---

By the way, most employees and jobs at Mozilla are distributed. Nobody on my team shares time zone with more than one co-worker on a team of 7 engineers :)