Facebook turns its face Away from IITs due to visa problems
New Delhi: One of the heartbreaking news for the IITians graduating this year is that Facebook might give them a miss this year. With Mark Zuckerberg coming to Delhi on October 28, 2015, the speculations were that more Indians might be hired by Facebook this year. Instead, IITs might not see any internships, pre-placement offers (PPOs) or hiring action from their beloved social media giant at all.
It is said that Facebook has not clamped down on hiring in India because the company does not want Indian engineering talent anymore but because the US now issues only limited H1B visas to the companies. Last year, the company had made about a dozen offers at 3 of the IITs with more-than-a-crore salaries. It even offered a package of about Rs 2 crore to software engineers going to work in California but then too it face visa problems. The company was forced to position the IITians it had hired in the UK for about a year before it could get proper visas to place them in the US.
This year, at least five IITs have confirmed that Facebook is not visiting them – including IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi.
At present, the US issues 65,000 H1B visas in April every year and the quota gets exhausted within days of annual allocation.
According to the NASSCOP VP Shivendra Singh, “It is expected that the US is going to need about 1 million STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers by 2020 but it is expected to have only 50% of the required workforce. India has a good supply of STEM talent and hence, IITians can expect a lot of opportunities in the coming years.â€Â