[jpgvm]

> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.

I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.

There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.

[Dig1t]

“Top tier programmer”

Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.

These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.

[kjellsbells]

Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?

Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.

My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.

[jpgvm]

> These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.

H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.

Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.

These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.

[selridge]

I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.

[weirdmantis69]

Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.

[jpgvm]

Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).

Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.

All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.