Facebook to give a miss to IITs this year

IITians who are looking forward to an employment opportunity with Facebook this year might get disappointed after reading this report. The online social networking firm, which had been among one of the most preferred choices of IIT graduates to start their career, might give India a miss this year owing to the limited H-1B visas.

As published in an Economic Times report, Facebook won’t come to India this year to pick it’s highly-qualified engineering graduates, both for internship as well as placement purposes.

Around five IITs have confirmed that the company is not visiting them this year. In 2014, FB had hired around a dozen Indians and their packages varied from Rs 1 crore to Rs 2 crore.

But when ET approached FB to know its response, the company declined to make any comment on the matter. A few company sources told the business daily that the firm had visa related problems last year as well, and this appears to be quite surprising to us that why there was a sudden change in their approach.

The new report clarified that owing to such hitches, FB had to place its IIT hires at the United Kingdom office for nearly a year before getting visas in place for the US.

Atal Ashutosh Agarwal, vice-president, Technology Students' Gymkhana at IIT Kharagpur, told ET, "Facebook did not come this year for undergraduate interns at our IIT."

Mohak Mehta, who is former placement manager at IIT Bombay, also revealed that "Visa is an issue for US-based technology companies that hire from India."

Shivendra Singh, VP, NASSCOM, told ET, "Considering that a million of STEM workers would be needed by the US in some years, they are likely to fall short by almost 50%. India has a good supply of talent in this space, which also includes the young IITians."

Currently, the quota for H-1B visas is 65,000, which is exhausted within a few days of annual allocation becoming available at the beginning of April each year.