[itqwertz]

The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era. The increased attention on the H-1B visa’s hiring process and labor market impact reveals a far more underreported and significant contributor to job shortages. Also, a lot of these companies have existed way longer than they should have.

Be happy you’re not employed in tech course content creation or something that is directly replaceable TODAY, like language translation or low-level graphic design.

[notahacker]

> The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era

This. Better to tell markets "we can now downsize our workforce due to incredible efficiencies achieved by our AI initiative" than "we hired too many people, grew slower than expected and now we're making cuts"

[underlipton]

A little tinfoil birdie told me that even the Covid era itself (and the resultant mass layoffs during, mass hiring following, and mass layoffs following that) were a smokescreen for (bond?) market instability. I personally tend to think that both were more of a, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," situation.

Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.

Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy, personnel you totally need in order to build a metaverse or whatever.

Money ran out + overleveraging during the boom + market changes caused by the rapid socioeconomic shifts (e.g., commercial real estate tanking)? You can cover the bottom line for now with a lot of firing and consolidation, say it's AI's fault.

[zahlman]

> A little tinfoil birdie told me

I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.

> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.

This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:

> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]

Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.

So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).

> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy

This is just naturally what would happen.

> Money ran out

It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)

[j45]

One way I had it explained to me (may be different now).. H-1B's are often a way of getting willing candidates who are overqualified to work tons of extra hours for years compared to other options.

[the_real_cher]

My anecdata is that all the ones I've worked with have been underqualified, not saying all are, but Indian managers primarily hire Indian staff.

[utyop22]

Heres another way to think about it.

How has humanity organised itself to maximize productivity throughout time? By means of slavery.

What really is h1b at the core? Its a modern form of slavery - it appears to be voluntary in nature (to a degree it is) but the key point is that it creates lock in. That lock in enables a slave-like culture to thrive. And this is what we see.

And btw just install Sundar and Satya as CEOs to voluntarily attract more Indian software engineers and so on...

Lmao its so easy to see whats been going on. These guys arent all that smart, even though they are worshipped.

[utyop22]

There is very clearly tacit collusion by managers of firms in the software production segment of economy.

And why not? It benefits them. I get it. But lets be real about it.

[oytis]

Covid overhiring was quite a while ago, surely it has been long corrected?

[zahlman]

As far as I can tell, it didn't start causing problems until the piper had to be paid (in the form of interest rate hikes), and even then probably a lot of businesses had a fair amount of runway.