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Comment by cmadan | Hacker News Reader

Sources tell me that they are asking 90% of their staff at Bangalore to relocate to CA instead of laying off them. Not ideal, but better than being laid off.

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Wouldn't that be an offer to apply internally for any open positions rather than a mass move? Meaning 95% of them will find nothing.

It would make no sense to lay off 1000s of people only to encourage them to move somewhere where you have to pay them more money.

Wouldn't that be impractical or impossible from a visa standpoint? That seems like a lot of H1Bs in 1 year for a single company.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

They might use L1's which AFAIK aren't capped.

Almost certainly. Yahoo most likely has a blanket L1: http://www.murthy.com/worker/l-1-visas-statuses/l-1-blanket/

L1 visas are terrible. You cannot change employers on an L1 Visa.

Years before you can change to H1B the next year in US, but lotteries made all these all changed.

They are better than H1 visas, because your spouse can work. Other benefits: no cap, faster path to green card.

Path to Green Card is long and arduous if its a L1B which is most likely going to be the case

Yes, although H1Bs aren't a great either. Most people I know who were on an L1 got their company to sponsor an H1 visa after a year or two and then change jobs a few years down the switch.

Just curious, not mad or anything, can anybody let me know why this is being downvoted? I didn't claim that it was factual or anything, just what I heard. What HN etiquette did I break? :)

It's a small-ish "bug" in HN, IMO: there are times when you think something is wrong, and want to downvote it, but ideally would put it at 0, and no lower, because you can tell that it's probably an honest mistake, rather than an attempt to deceive or spread false information.

So people probably think you're wrong.

I wouldn't worry about it. There's nothing wrong with your post and haven't broken etiquette as far as I can tell :-).

I guess in that case they wouldn't have to pay severance, because formally it is not a layoff.

Relocating 2000 people with H1B?

InfoSys and other bodyshoppers do much more than that every year :-). Yahoo'll probably use L1 s though. With some help from the Immigration folks (which Yahoo has the clout to arrange if they wanted), this should be easy enough.

And thanks to them people who work for smaller companies without blanket setups get screwed over

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8421474 (modders, no need to mod)

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