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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

> Why would Apple, with all their money, need to hire H-1B generalist Software Engineers and Project Managers when they can out-compete literally any other company on earth?

Honestly?

Someone at a FAANG I won’t name explained it to me: They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing. If they like the person, legal is given the task of getting them a work visa. If they can’t, they’ll park the foreign worker at a satellite office until they can secure one. H1s and O1 are rather cheap in terms of legal fees. Especially when you operate at scale.

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> They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing.

Believe it or not, that's actually a good thing. It means they're looking only at skills and qualifications, not passports or "driving down wages with foreign labor", when making hiring decisions.

Also it's not completely true. Recruiters will make a note of your employment eligibility for planning purposes (a new hire needing a visa transfer will take longer to start, the company has to allocate budget to legal etc). In large companies the people making the hiring decision most likely have no idea, and definitely do not care, about the candidate's work permit status. It's a thing for HR to take care of as a part of closing the deal.

That's how it works at most tech companies that run this scam, which is most tech companies. The point is that FAANG companies should have a tiny number of H-1Bs if they were following the law. Instead, they have the most H-1Bs.

And instead of getting in legal trouble for fraud like this company, they're protected by their size, legal teams, lobbyists, and money. It's only H-1B fraud if you're doing it at a relatively small scale.

> They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing

As far as I remember, the vast majority, if not all, of recruiters I spoke with in the past few years asked me about my work eligibility in the US.

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