I'm curious - you seem to be saying that FAANG companies can't find enough employees, but your support for the point is that Google hired a significant amount of H1B workers. However, I've read/seen that many H1B workers work for significantly less, and under more pressure, because they are trying to become citizens in the US. Is it possible that the reason for FAANG companies hiring so many H1B workers isn't due to shortage of qualified new employees, but instead because they are more efficient workers, due to the pressures and lower salary?
I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.
My main point was, a globally distributed labor pool is already accessible to FAANG and is being utilized despite higher transition costs both for the employer and the employee. The H1B hires for FAANG is the global top talent for which companies compete for, hence an upward pressure for compensation, not downward. In fact you can check the H1B salary information yourself from the website I linked, to see that salaries are at par with US levels. I admit there might be some difference is non-salary compensation such as signing bonuses and inital stock grants, but I would attribute that to lack/difficulty of deploying local negotiation tactics (e.g get several offers and pit them to each other). In general price of the labor is not a driving factor at all. Besides, most of these companies will happily pay for a law firm to help with the green card application process of their employees, and H1B is transferable to a new employer, possibly to another FAANG company. Yes, all of these pose transition costs, but it is far from the desparate overworked underpaid foreign worker image painted.
For your second point, the delta of the “higher salary” is important. US ranks the highest in sofware engineer salaries globally, which means for most countries coming to US as a software engineer will mean a much higher increase in salary than within US. If that delta offsets the perceived cost of leaving friends and family behind, they it is rational to take the offer. In other words, non-US candidates need to be hurting much more than US candidates to lose access to friends and family to not take the offer. In fact they already do, they lose access to their culture and their language unless they are from anglosphere. They still take the offers, so the income differential must be more than adequate to make the transition. Additionally, individual cost function of losing access to these things will differ. Many people will actively seek a challenge away from their friends and families to take up new opportunities and experiences. Your friends seems to have not.
Actually, I think is misrepresented what I was trying to ask by including salary. I don't think or have any evidence to suggest H1B salaries are lower, only that pressure on H1B employees is higher to perform, as they are working for more than just the salary, but also the visa.
Thanks for your detailed response, though. I understand what you're saying more clearly.
It is actually very difficult to get an initial H-1B worker, since the worker has to get selected in a lottery, and the company has to wait 7 months.[1] The odds of getting picked in the H1B lottery is around 32% as of 2020. The 7-month wait time itself massively disincentivizes employers from hiring non-US workers. The end result is that most of H1B sponsorships go to people already in the US on a student visa who are working for the company using a status called "F-1 OPT". It's quite difficult to get hired from abroad. Many larger companies still do it, and are willing to wait 7 months, but the wait 7-month time and uncertain nature of the lottery are significant factors that discourage companies from hiring non-US workers.
For out-of-US hires, Facebook will actually get you a Canadian work visa, and have you work in Canada for the 7 month wait, and potentially for year if you don't get picked in the lottery. The strategy for multiple large firms is to bring non-US workers to Canada first, and then try to move them over to the US, since US immigration law is extraordinarily restrictive compared to most countries.
[1] The company applies for the worker in March of the year, and if the individual is picked in the lottery, they get to start working for them in October.
H1B in tech companies are not paid significantly less, and they can easily find alternative employers willing to help with the transfer in Silicon Valley. It's H1B in non-tech companies that manipulate job postings to massively underpay their workers, and whose geographically-limited set of alternative employers are already small and also generally less willing to offer legal support dealing with the H1B transfer issues.
I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.
In reality, it's probably a mix of both.