Just to clarify (I'm not taking a particular position on this discussion):

At Facebook, as of earlier this year at least, most Software Engineer and Production Engineer hires are definitely not headed toward a particular team. For the first few weeks, they're in 'bootcamp', which is quite generalized. For example: I've never done any meaningful Android or iPhone development in my life, but during bootcamp, I learned how to do Android and iPhone development (at a basic level) at Facebook.

After the first few weeks, but with a couple of weeks remaining in bootcamp, new hires are actively looking at and talking to different teams with open positions to join. By the end of bootcamp, a total of about five weeks, the person formally joins a team.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Facebook hires people under a generic role (Software Engineer) and then has them choose the team they will join after a “bootcamp” session. So they are not preallocated to a team to fulfill a specific need, and it’s not a direct 1 requisition to 1 person type system. I believe that’s what the above poster was referring to when they mentioned Facebook hiring to be general.

The purpose of the program seems to be to bring in workers where there is a specific need, so if it’s a generic role then that’s not helpful to their cause.

Definitely not true. "Competent developer" is sufficiently specific. Role is just an instance of the class job.

What purpose do you need to hire that developer for?

To build software so you can compete with other software companies? These big companies have large engineering offices overseas as well, if they can't hire in USA they'd just put these people there instead. They wouldn't start hiring less qualified Americans as many in this thread seems to believe.

“Building software to compete with other companies” wouldn’t be specific enough for me if I was the judge.

If you said to me “we are building a VR headset and there is a specific image technique we want to employ to correct for foveated lenses, and we want to bring in an image processing expert” then that would be different if I was the judge.

I’m not arguing what should be the case, I’m saying what I think the intent of the current law accommodates for.

Right. But the DOJ is saying you cannot use the law that way.

> Facebook is looking to hire a human to fill a spot in the org chart.

This isn't true. Most (not all) engineers are just hired into "Facebook", in general, not onto a specific team with a specific manager. They choose a team to join about ~2 months after joining the company and going through an internal training and team selection process.

> Most (not all) engineers are just hired into "Facebook", in general

That, to me, sounds like a place on the org chart. Like you have a division or a subsidiary and they have X engineers. Those engineers could be placed with more detail, but they're still inside the organization.

If you're hiring janitors aren't they still janitors even if you don't know what building they will clean?

I feel like I am totally missing the point that people are trying to make and I apologize for being obtuse.

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 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

The interesting thing is how difficult it is to understand the specific goal(s) of legislation. It depends on who you ask.

I think you're just misunderstanding the terminology. An org chart is a diagram that shows the connection between each manager and the people they directly manage. When you don't know who someone's direct manager will be, they don't have a "place on the org chart" yet.

I don't think that's it? "Org chart" describes both charts that identify particular people and also charts that describe the larger organization[1]. When Facebook says they are going to hire 3000 engineers, they are adding 3000 people to the Facebook organization. Even if they don't know what division / project / team / etc those people will end up in.

Edit: Probably a better thing to say is - even if I was using org chart wrong, I don't see how it would make a difference. Hiring N people that fit a set of requirements is seeking to fill N positions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_chart has examples of both. You could imagine the organization chart of Tabulating Machine Co. including headcounts for each division.

I would say it's more to assert or, if you are skeptical, present, in good faith that your business model or strategy isn't H1-B employee arbitrage. I.e. for the purpose of this scenario, in a holistic sense, Facebook doesn't avoid hiring Americans.

So like, the government says facebook had a bunch of PERM positions that they sandbagged recruiting for to Americans. But then, > while comparable positions at Facebook that were advertised on its careers website during a similar time period typically attracted 100 or more applicants each.

Are these...the same positions? How does facebook's hiring process work? Is there actually any discrete limit to the 'slots' on the careers website? Do they have 2500 listings for software engineers, or just like, everyone applies, we are looking to hire ~2000 people this year.

I can see where the government is probably right in saying "you did it wrong". But if you are facebook, and the hiring strategy is honestly:

* Hiring for the 'American' positions is only limited by the company finding the applicant skilled enough. There is no numerical cap.

* Only foreign applicants apply to a discrete, government-limited pool of PERM positions. This way you don't waste the PERM positions on Americans, who can apply to you nigh-unlimited pool of 'American' positions.

* Starting salary for everyone is the same ($156k)

I could certainly see that the government's way of interpreting your 'insidious hiring program' is flat-footed to the point of being wrong.

Seems like a bad idea to allow a corporation to reinterpret immigration law to mix and match visas and green cards in whatever ways that best fits its goals. You can pretty much bet it will be used in a way that gets around some aspect of the law.

Suppose the 500 jobs at the highest skill level are basically impossible to keep filled? Playing games like you suggest allows them to continually hire less skilled workers for roles Americans have no problem filling also. And they can continually complain to congress about needing more visas.

Admittedly, reading the complaint further, it looks like there are accusations facebook did indeed do some sketchy stuff with regards to the process. For instance, if an American happened to actually apply to one of these jobs, and be qualified, they allege facebook would just abandon the process.

But honestly, I think for the same reasons that what they did was sketchy, I find myself agreeing with it more. I think that the complaint really buries the lede because not only did they have someone in mind with these PERM positions, according to the complaint, it looks like they had someone in mind who already worked for them.

Once again, I can see why the government is mad, facebook seems to have hacked their process. But while there is an accusation of a systematic dark pattern, I don't view it as a pattern of abuse. If the law is so spinlocked that you can't in good faith hire your own employees at market rates since they aren't American, I can't really blame companies trying to take their destiny into their own hands.

A lot of immigration law seems built around the idea that workers are interchangeable cogs. I see a lot of arguments in the comments here that seem based on the same assumption.

At top tier software shops (that pay US and immigrant employees the same) you're lucky if you can find enough US employees to fill the available roles by the time the next fiscal year starts. There are plenty of people applying who call themselves "Software Engineers" but most of them aren't very good. There is also a limit to how many new grads you can take on while having the bandwidth to train them. Once every team of 3-7 has a new grad you can't really take on any more. And the places I'm talking about already pay the highest salaries and bonuses in the world for SWEs.

Doing an L1 transfer or H1b is a lot of work. Dealing with PERM is a lot of work. If there really were a glut of super capable US engineers no one would bother going through that hassle.

Just what is supposed to happen here when you're already paying 2-3x (or more) average comp, hiring hundreds or thousands of US engineers every year, and you still can't find enough people?

I guess the government thinks somehow you should use the PERM process to find a replacement for your immigrant employee when you already can't find enough qualified US candidates to fill the brand new positions your company created this fiscal year? That chain of logic just leads to an even bigger deficit in unfilled positions or a government mandate to lower hiring standards. Neither of those is good for the company's competitiveness.

I don't know if this case is politically motivated but surely the Justice Department's time would be better spent going after the many well-known H1b body shops, where mega corps are abusing the system to replace US workers with cheaper immigrants?

If you mean the big consulting firms, they got taken out first. And they still prove the point don't they? The constraints got tightened, but it's still a bell curve with most people at the lowest level that makes it past the constraint.

And while I shudder at the thought of Facebook not being able to man its critical ad targeting development, this is all about growth and taking over every major new booming product category as they emerge. The more people they can funnel into the game of leveraging of their current products to take over others, the more they can take over. Then the economics of paying more makes sense. Also the need for people productive immediately without training. Though according to the complaint, the pay for PERM positions is 156k, not that crazy. And that's the average. For a company in Menlo Park. This isn't the "super-capable" people of the field.

Definitely, I agree with that a lot. That the process as-is would force them to justify not hiring an American over the foreign employee who already works for them just feels so strange to me.