6 ms·

The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where

The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?

cube00 11mo ago
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect. This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members. C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
- j-bos 11mo ago
  Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
- clanky 11mo ago
  > C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it. Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
  - andy99 11mo ago
    If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
    - clanky 11mo ago
      An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
- scorpioxy 11mo ago
  They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies. By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
  - deaux 11mo ago
    It doesn't need regulation, it needs taxation. No more billionaires. The endgame is that there's simply not going to be nearly enough jobs. There already aren't, as described in the article, hence why there's all the artificial jobs.
- arthurcolle 11mo ago
  Why are executives allowed to lie, and the rest of us have to just deal with it? At some point the chickens come home to roost
  - tartoran 11mo ago
    Because they can? Because we don't do anything about it?
- throwawayFanta 11mo ago
  As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
- lisbbb 11mo ago
  The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate. Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
    - deaux 11mo ago
      It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. > Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers. Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens. Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
      - terminalshort 11mo ago
        > Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. Another baseless assumption. > they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company. Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
Jcampuzano2 11mo ago
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back. Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things. H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
- margorczynski 11mo ago
  The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration. So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
  - llmthrow0827 11mo ago
    You have a grave misunderstanding of how the American government works if you think this isn't things working as intended.
  - gdulli 11mo ago
    They stoke fear of immigrants to win elections, but to the extent that their donors want that labor, it will be allowed to continue.
    - lisbbb 11mo ago
      Immigrants are one thing, but opening the floodgates to 20 million non-citizens by abusing an asylum law meant to grant relief to tens or hundreds was a huge problem.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - gdulli 11mo ago
        That sounds like a big scary Fox News number, got any actual detail or context for it?
ralph84 11mo ago
Because H1B was never about shortages, it is about wage suppression and having an exploitable underclass.
atleastoptimal 11mo ago
you know the answer
Buttons840 11mo ago
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
- platevoltage 11mo ago
  I mean, occasionally he does have a good idea, then he's quickly reminded who he works for.
- clanky 11mo ago
  A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
  - lisbbb 11mo ago
    That isn't what happened at all. The SNAP funds have to be appropriated by Congress. Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some groups sued and some judge was asking the Executive Branch to break the law using some emergency fund or funds from WIC or other pots of money that aren't truly earmarked for SNAP. The Judiciary way overstepped there. Then, when a percentage of funds were made available via some mechanism, a few blue states jumped the line and took 100% of them, leaving most states high and dry sans funds. So that looks pretty bad--instead of an even allocation of a percentage, most people get nothing. SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country. As far as the $2k checks go, I have no idea. Sigh... Dumb dumb dumb! I just want the national debt paid down and the US Govt. to have a budget and live within its means without deficits. Is that so hard? I do think Trump sends up trial balloons that exist solely to distract the media.
PlanksVariable 11mo ago
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
- s5300 11mo ago
  [dead]
- thefourthchime 11mo ago
  Same, we haven't hired in 5 years. I know bright young college grade who has been looking for a job for way too long.
- YZF 11mo ago
  I work for big tech and we've been hiring US graduates fairly continuously. We're also taking students for internships. We've also had people poached by other companies. I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job. Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments. Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats... Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
asdfman123 11mo ago
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now. I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- thefourthchime 11mo ago
  Yeah, true. I worked for a big tech company when they were building a team in China so they could lay us all off in Palo Alto.
  - asdfman123 11mo ago
    How long did it take?
    - thefourthchime 11mo ago
      About a year
IdiocyInAction 11mo ago
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
- Squarex 11mo ago
  These people are exactly what H1B is for. The problem is that most h1b hires now are not that exceptional.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 11mo ago
  Do you live in the same reality as the rest of us? Most h1bs are not competitive programming champions, they are totally average in every way
- leovingi 11mo ago
  Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/ https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries. Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
dilyevsky 11mo ago
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
gruez 11mo ago
>The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.
Squarex 11mo ago
I find it strange. Any other qualified profession like doctors or lawyers would never let there an army of people from other countries to worsen their job market.
MITSardine 11mo ago
Are junior / new grads getting sponsored for H1Bs, or senior people?

The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?

cube00 11mo ago

My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect. This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members. C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.

j-bos 11mo ago
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
clanky 11mo ago
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it. Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
- andy99 11mo ago
  If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
  - clanky 11mo ago
    An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
scorpioxy 11mo ago
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies. By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
- deaux 11mo ago
  It doesn't need regulation, it needs taxation. No more billionaires. The endgame is that there's simply not going to be nearly enough jobs. There already aren't, as described in the article, hence why there's all the artificial jobs.
arthurcolle 11mo ago
Why are executives allowed to lie, and the rest of us have to just deal with it? At some point the chickens come home to roost
- tartoran 11mo ago
  Because they can? Because we don't do anything about it?
throwawayFanta 11mo ago
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
lisbbb 11mo ago
The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate. Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
  - deaux 11mo ago
    It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. > Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers. Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens. Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
    - terminalshort 11mo ago
      > Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. Another baseless assumption. > they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company. Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.

Jcampuzano2 11mo ago

Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back. Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things. H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.

margorczynski 11mo ago
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration. So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
- llmthrow0827 11mo ago
  You have a grave misunderstanding of how the American government works if you think this isn't things working as intended.
- gdulli 11mo ago
  They stoke fear of immigrants to win elections, but to the extent that their donors want that labor, it will be allowed to continue.
  - lisbbb 11mo ago
    Immigrants are one thing, but opening the floodgates to 20 million non-citizens by abusing an asylum law meant to grant relief to tens or hundreds was a huge problem.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - gdulli 11mo ago
      That sounds like a big scary Fox News number, got any actual detail or context for it?

ralph84 11mo ago

Because H1B was never about shortages, it is about wage suppression and having an exploitable underclass.

atleastoptimal 11mo ago

you know the answer

Buttons840 11mo ago

I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.

platevoltage 11mo ago
I mean, occasionally he does have a good idea, then he's quickly reminded who he works for.
clanky 11mo ago
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
- lisbbb 11mo ago
  That isn't what happened at all. The SNAP funds have to be appropriated by Congress. Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some groups sued and some judge was asking the Executive Branch to break the law using some emergency fund or funds from WIC or other pots of money that aren't truly earmarked for SNAP. The Judiciary way overstepped there. Then, when a percentage of funds were made available via some mechanism, a few blue states jumped the line and took 100% of them, leaving most states high and dry sans funds. So that looks pretty bad--instead of an even allocation of a percentage, most people get nothing. SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country. As far as the $2k checks go, I have no idea. Sigh... Dumb dumb dumb! I just want the national debt paid down and the US Govt. to have a budget and live within its means without deficits. Is that so hard? I do think Trump sends up trial balloons that exist solely to distract the media.

PlanksVariable 11mo ago

At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

s5300 11mo ago
[dead]
thefourthchime 11mo ago
Same, we haven't hired in 5 years. I know bright young college grade who has been looking for a job for way too long.
YZF 11mo ago
I work for big tech and we've been hiring US graduates fairly continuously. We're also taking students for internships. We've also had people poached by other companies. I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job. Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments. Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats... Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.

asdfman123 11mo ago

At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now. I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
thefourthchime 11mo ago
Yeah, true. I worked for a big tech company when they were building a team in China so they could lay us all off in Palo Alto.
- asdfman123 11mo ago
  How long did it take?
  - thefourthchime 11mo ago
    About a year

IdiocyInAction 11mo ago

A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.

Squarex 11mo ago
These people are exactly what H1B is for. The problem is that most h1b hires now are not that exceptional.
GOD_Over_Djinn 11mo ago
Do you live in the same reality as the rest of us? Most h1bs are not competitive programming champions, they are totally average in every way
leovingi 11mo ago
Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/ https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries. Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.

dilyevsky 11mo ago

What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his

gruez 11mo ago

>The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. Source? Trump's 100k fee only started in September, and I can't find any official statistics since then.

Squarex 11mo ago

I find it strange. Any other qualified profession like doctors or lawyers would never let there an army of people from other countries to worsen their job market.

MITSardine 11mo ago

Are junior / new grads getting sponsored for H1Bs, or senior people?