107 ms·

Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

alephnerd 8mo ago
We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap. And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408 [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-draws-52-billion-from-amazon-microsoft-in-tech-expansion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra... [2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshoring-its-prized-engineering-jobs-to-india-2e487fd0?st=6e6u1D&reflink=article_copyURL_share https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin... [3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h-1b-visa-curbs-banks-to-add-more-finance-specialist-jobs-in-india https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
- weirdmantis69 8mo ago
  oh well.... I'm totally fine with this.
  - barbazoo 8mo ago
    Certainly for the people working there, right?
- kadabra9 8mo ago
  I love how this is always framed as a "pipeline and talent" problem issue (its not), when it's really a "pipeline and talent at salaries I want to pay" issue.
  - alephnerd 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kadabra9 8mo ago
      Yeah, we know. I wish guys like you could just be honest and admit its really just about trying to save on labor costs rather than trying to frame this issue like there's some massive lack of skilled domestic engineering talent here.
      - alephnerd 8mo ago
        It is talent though. You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background. Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
        anonym29 8mo ago
        There are plenty of non-juniors who meet all of your expectations, you just want to pay them less than market rate for their expertise.
        skeledrew 8mo ago
        Market rate is a function of supply and demand. Unless the market is regulated.
        anonym29 8mo ago
        Right. Demand is fairly rigid from companies who need the labor. But they, as for-profit entities, want to maximize shareholder value, so instead of paying market rate for labor when the market rate is high, companies attempt to decrease the market rate by increasing labor supply through a variety of means - lobbying for modern indentured servitude (H1b's), shipping jobs overseas, etc. This stands in direct contrast to the stated arguments they use to justify such moves, like "there isn't sufficient talent inside the US". There is sufficient talent inside the US, it just comes with a price tag they don't like.
- jmclnx 8mo ago
  Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor. There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock price growing. Then once the investors can sell the stock, they bail leaving the company to figure out how to survive by itself.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    It’s less this but more that talent diversity is present elsewhere. You need constant supply of talent and a good ecosystem that sustains it. Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.
    - kadabra9 8mo ago
      Talent diversity willing to work for lower salaries is present elsewhere. That's really what it comes down to.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        Yeah so? Willing to work for lower salaries is tied to the dynamic of having more supply of labour. What alternative do you propose?
  - jonfw 8mo ago
    > Decades ago companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring. It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in the US is so superior to make up for it. As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.
- energy123 8mo ago
  Warned? I knew this was going to happen and want to see more of it. I don't believe in government enforced discrimination based on country of origin. If you can't compete with someone overseas that's on you, don't make it my problem and don't go crying to the government to force others to hire you.
  - eudamoniac 8mo ago
    Do you believe in workers' rights?
    - energy123 8mo ago
      It depends if that's a euphemism for nativist negative-sum protectionism.
      - eudamoniac 8mo ago
        If I can't compete with someone overseas because I legally have to get a minimum wage and various benefits, while overseas guy will work 996 with a dollar an hour, why is that on me? We can either have worker's rights or we can have a globally equal competitive field, but not both.
        energy123 8mo ago
        The problem for me is that your conceptualization of worker's rights negatively impacts poorer people, stuck in poorer countries, who need that work more for basic survival. So if we're forming normative opinions based on morality (reducing suffering or whatnot), why would I support that? And if we're not not appealing to morality, then what are you appealing to, and why would I want to go along with it? The only argument I see is a nativist and protectionist one, which uses the superficial facade of morality as a misdirection. My intention is not to punch down on anyone. I support some level of taxation and wealth redistribution. I support anti-slavery legislation.
MrJobbo 8mo ago
Time to crack down on these cheats.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  Good thing the new driving force of the new way to do software engineering wasn't built on stealing all of the work of everyone
givemeethekeys 8mo ago
They were exporting jobs before too.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
spiderfarmer 8mo ago
The rest of the world is moving on.
sharadov 8mo ago
Good for India, as it should, for far too long there was a brain drain from India > US. India needs more entrepreneurs.
- AdamN 8mo ago
  In narrow terms this is bad for Indian entrepreneurs since it drives up engineering costs for them. It's good for Indian tech employees though since they can demand higher compensation. In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
  - andrew_lettuce 8mo ago
    But not particularly good for the startup ecosystem; it could make it even less attractive to not take a corporate job
    - sharadov 8mo ago
      I am more interested in 2nd order effects, people get experience working at these larger companies and leave to start their own. Exactly how SV works.
  - sharadov 8mo ago
    33K workers added in 2025 is a drop in the bucket for India. India graduates way too many engineers vs not as many jobs created.
Daishiman 8mo ago
Well yeah. I went to a world-class research university in Latam. The brightest kids were making using of internships to Google, Microsoft and Meta a couple years before graduating and by then they already had a career path laid out for them in the Bay Area. I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.
- AdamN 8mo ago
  It's bifurcated. Big Tech used it to increase the labor pool local to their existing development centers. The consultancies used it to drive down unit costs.
palmotea 8mo ago
> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and funding to Tel Aviv. Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta... [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-dallas-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
  - dzonga 8mo ago
    yeah Israel tends to be strong in cyber security. However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market
  - spwa4 8mo ago
    That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ... Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
  - butterbomb 8mo ago
    > less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos. I’m going to wager at least one reason for this is Israel is big in industries that demand that sort of knowledge where in the US, most money was made by CRUD monkeys putting together high level line of business applications.
garbawarb 8mo ago
For the first time I've been hearing "this job is only available for US citizens and permanent residents" in recruiter reachouts, and these are for jobs that don't need anything like a security clearance. It's surprising because a TN status (my current status) is trivially easy to get.
silisili 8mo ago
I'd be more apt to believe this if the mass layoffs and outsourcing hadn't started long before any "scrutiny" of H1B.
some_random 8mo ago
This is a complete lie, they have been exporting jobs for a very long time.
- estearum 8mo ago
  Ah the classic “behavior X happened before, so an uptick in behavior X is not worth talking about!” Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
light_hue_1 8mo ago
Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas. I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent. This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here. It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  > It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago. The US is one country, "Europe" is what, 44 countries? You posit that 44 countries "did the same thing a century ago." How surprising can it possibly be that a 45th country might join that prestigious list... maybe?
- butterbomb 8mo ago
  > silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas. Good god, we may just be able to save America!
abhiyerra 8mo ago
Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India. I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
- ottah 8mo ago
  I would love to see India to grow out it's tech sector to something resembling what's going on in China.
stego-tech 8mo ago
Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems. - Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason) - Outsource, offshore, automate, etc - Margins and revenue go up - Two to Three Years go by - Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor - Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored - Executives parachute out successfully - New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive - Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country - Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit - Leader parachutes out successfully - New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections). None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way. Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state. > In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay out significant accumulated dividends, limiting Henry Ford's ability to prioritize employee wages and consumer prices over shareholder returns.
JamesLeonis 8mo ago
I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0. In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed]. > Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown] I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s. [laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-2002/ https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20... [pushed offshore]: - https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes-world-IT-outsourcing/5003401040603/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes... - https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-archived/slowdown-speeds-up-outsourcing-2002-04/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar... - https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megadeals-soared-in-2002.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade... [poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-it-outsourcing-strategies-for-avoiding-relational-trauma/ https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i... [reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-and-backsourcing-at-jpmorgan-chase.html https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a... [collapsed]: - https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsourcing-contributes-to-it-salaries-downward-spiral https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour... - https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html - https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-down-23-computer-engineering-down-19/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do... - https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-science-education-may-need-its-1150741.php https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc... [brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-see-drop-in-enrollment-after-tech-bubble-burst https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...
ottah 8mo ago
The talent being desperate and willing to work for low wages.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  People need to eat.
NimrodKramer 8mo ago
[dead]

We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap. And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408 [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-draws-52-billion-from-amazon-microsoft-in-tech-expansion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra... [2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshoring-its-prized-engineering-jobs-to-india-2e487fd0?st=6e6u1D&reflink=article_copyURL_share https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin... [3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h-1b-visa-curbs-banks-to-add-more-finance-specialist-jobs-in-india https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...

weirdmantis69 8mo ago
oh well.... I'm totally fine with this.
- barbazoo 8mo ago
  Certainly for the people working there, right?
kadabra9 8mo ago
I love how this is always framed as a "pipeline and talent" problem issue (its not), when it's really a "pipeline and talent at salaries I want to pay" issue.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kadabra9 8mo ago
    Yeah, we know. I wish guys like you could just be honest and admit its really just about trying to save on labor costs rather than trying to frame this issue like there's some massive lack of skilled domestic engineering talent here.
    - alephnerd 8mo ago
      It is talent though. You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background. Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
      - anonym29 8mo ago
        There are plenty of non-juniors who meet all of your expectations, you just want to pay them less than market rate for their expertise.
        skeledrew 8mo ago
        Market rate is a function of supply and demand. Unless the market is regulated.
        anonym29 8mo ago
        Right. Demand is fairly rigid from companies who need the labor. But they, as for-profit entities, want to maximize shareholder value, so instead of paying market rate for labor when the market rate is high, companies attempt to decrease the market rate by increasing labor supply through a variety of means - lobbying for modern indentured servitude (H1b's), shipping jobs overseas, etc. This stands in direct contrast to the stated arguments they use to justify such moves, like "there isn't sufficient talent inside the US". There is sufficient talent inside the US, it just comes with a price tag they don't like.
jmclnx 8mo ago
Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor. There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock price growing. Then once the investors can sell the stock, they bail leaving the company to figure out how to survive by itself.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  It’s less this but more that talent diversity is present elsewhere. You need constant supply of talent and a good ecosystem that sustains it. Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.
  - kadabra9 8mo ago
    Talent diversity willing to work for lower salaries is present elsewhere. That's really what it comes down to.
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      Yeah so? Willing to work for lower salaries is tied to the dynamic of having more supply of labour. What alternative do you propose?
- jonfw 8mo ago
  > Decades ago companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring. It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in the US is so superior to make up for it. As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.
energy123 8mo ago
Warned? I knew this was going to happen and want to see more of it. I don't believe in government enforced discrimination based on country of origin. If you can't compete with someone overseas that's on you, don't make it my problem and don't go crying to the government to force others to hire you.
- eudamoniac 8mo ago
  Do you believe in workers' rights?
  - energy123 8mo ago
    It depends if that's a euphemism for nativist negative-sum protectionism.
    - eudamoniac 8mo ago
      If I can't compete with someone overseas because I legally have to get a minimum wage and various benefits, while overseas guy will work 996 with a dollar an hour, why is that on me? We can either have worker's rights or we can have a globally equal competitive field, but not both.
      - energy123 8mo ago
        The problem for me is that your conceptualization of worker's rights negatively impacts poorer people, stuck in poorer countries, who need that work more for basic survival. So if we're forming normative opinions based on morality (reducing suffering or whatnot), why would I support that? And if we're not not appealing to morality, then what are you appealing to, and why would I want to go along with it? The only argument I see is a nativist and protectionist one, which uses the superficial facade of morality as a misdirection. My intention is not to punch down on anyone. I support some level of taxation and wealth redistribution. I support anti-slavery legislation.

MrJobbo 8mo ago

Time to crack down on these cheats.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
Good thing the new driving force of the new way to do software engineering wasn't built on stealing all of the work of everyone

givemeethekeys 8mo ago

They were exporting jobs before too.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

spiderfarmer 8mo ago

The rest of the world is moving on.

sharadov 8mo ago

Good for India, as it should, for far too long there was a brain drain from India > US. India needs more entrepreneurs.

AdamN 8mo ago
In narrow terms this is bad for Indian entrepreneurs since it drives up engineering costs for them. It's good for Indian tech employees though since they can demand higher compensation. In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
- andrew_lettuce 8mo ago
  But not particularly good for the startup ecosystem; it could make it even less attractive to not take a corporate job
  - sharadov 8mo ago
    I am more interested in 2nd order effects, people get experience working at these larger companies and leave to start their own. Exactly how SV works.
- sharadov 8mo ago
  33K workers added in 2025 is a drop in the bucket for India. India graduates way too many engineers vs not as many jobs created.

Daishiman 8mo ago

Well yeah. I went to a world-class research university in Latam. The brightest kids were making using of internships to Google, Microsoft and Meta a couple years before graduating and by then they already had a career path laid out for them in the Bay Area. I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.

AdamN 8mo ago
It's bifurcated. Big Tech used it to increase the labor pool local to their existing development centers. The consultancies used it to drive down unit costs.

palmotea 8mo ago

> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.

alephnerd 8mo ago
I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and funding to Tel Aviv. Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta... [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-dallas-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
- dzonga 8mo ago
  yeah Israel tends to be strong in cyber security. However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market
- spwa4 8mo ago
  That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ... Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
- butterbomb 8mo ago
  > less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos. I’m going to wager at least one reason for this is Israel is big in industries that demand that sort of knowledge where in the US, most money was made by CRUD monkeys putting together high level line of business applications.

garbawarb 8mo ago

For the first time I've been hearing "this job is only available for US citizens and permanent residents" in recruiter reachouts, and these are for jobs that don't need anything like a security clearance. It's surprising because a TN status (my current status) is trivially easy to get.

silisili 8mo ago

I'd be more apt to believe this if the mass layoffs and outsourcing hadn't started long before any "scrutiny" of H1B.

some_random 8mo ago

This is a complete lie, they have been exporting jobs for a very long time.

estearum 8mo ago
Ah the classic “behavior X happened before, so an uptick in behavior X is not worth talking about!” Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

light_hue_1 8mo ago

Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas. I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent. This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here. It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.

irishcoffee 8mo ago
> It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago. The US is one country, "Europe" is what, 44 countries? You posit that 44 countries "did the same thing a century ago." How surprising can it possibly be that a 45th country might join that prestigious list... maybe?
butterbomb 8mo ago
> silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas. Good god, we may just be able to save America!

abhiyerra 8mo ago

Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India. I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.

ottah 8mo ago
I would love to see India to grow out it's tech sector to something resembling what's going on in China.

stego-tech 8mo ago

Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems. - Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason) - Outsource, offshore, automate, etc - Margins and revenue go up - Two to Three Years go by - Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor - Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored - Executives parachute out successfully - New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive - Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country - Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit - Leader parachutes out successfully - New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections). None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way. Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.

irishcoffee 8mo ago
Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state. > In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay out significant accumulated dividends, limiting Henry Ford's ability to prioritize employee wages and consumer prices over shareholder returns.

JamesLeonis 8mo ago

I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0. In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed]. > Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown] I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s. [laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-2002/ https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20... [pushed offshore]: - https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes-world-IT-outsourcing/5003401040603/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes... - https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-archived/slowdown-speeds-up-outsourcing-2002-04/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar... - https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megadeals-soared-in-2002.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade... [poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-it-outsourcing-strategies-for-avoiding-relational-trauma/ https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i... [reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-and-backsourcing-at-jpmorgan-chase.html https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a... [collapsed]: - https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsourcing-contributes-to-it-salaries-downward-spiral https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour... - https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html - https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-down-23-computer-engineering-down-19/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do... - https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-science-education-may-need-its-1150741.php https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc... [brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-see-drop-in-enrollment-after-tech-bubble-burst https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...

ottah 8mo ago

The talent being desperate and willing to work for low wages.

skeledrew 8mo ago
People need to eat.

NimrodKramer 8mo ago

[dead]