> 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.
The language people use is funny. When companies offshore skilled factory jobs to foreign countries, they call that "offshoring." But when it comes to programmers, they call it "going where the talent is." They act like programmers are in a different class than machinists.
I worked at Google for years. We simply hired as many people as we could find who could get through the process.
If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.
At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."
Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
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.
At a given level of skills, the company will favor the cheapest employees. At a given level of salary (e.g. US market), the company will find the best possible candidates (most of them are foreigners, for simple statistical reasons).
Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.
If they have less flexibility to hire in the US, they will hire elsewhere if they can. They still have an incentive to hire in the US as it's easier to collaborate when everybody is close by, but apparently it's not enough to favor (less skilled and/or more expensive) US citizens.
What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
Why are Americans entitled to those jobs? If there are people in other countries happily willing to accept 1/10 of the pay do to the same work, why is it morally wrong deny them those jobs?
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
palmotea|7 days ago
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.
rayiner|7 days ago
lokar|7 days ago
If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.
At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
_alaya|7 days ago
I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."
Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
alephnerd|7 days ago
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
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
yodsanklai|7 days ago
Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.
If they have less flexibility to hire in the US, they will hire elsewhere if they can. They still have an incentive to hire in the US as it's easier to collaborate when everybody is close by, but apparently it's not enough to favor (less skilled and/or more expensive) US citizens.
What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
simianwords|7 days ago
baron816|7 days ago
stego-tech|7 days ago
- 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|7 days ago
> 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.
skeledrew|7 days ago
silisili|7 days ago
abhiyerra|7 days ago
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|7 days ago
sharadov|7 days ago
India needs more entrepreneurs.
AdamN|7 days ago
In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
Daishiman|7 days ago
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|7 days ago
givemeethekeys|7 days ago
unknown|7 days ago
[deleted]
alephnerd|7 days ago
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
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...
[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
kadabra9|7 days ago
jmclnx|7 days ago
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.
weirdmantis69|7 days ago
energy123|7 days ago
some_random|7 days ago
unknown|7 days ago
[deleted]
estearum|7 days ago
Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
garbawarb|7 days ago
ottah|7 days ago
skeledrew|7 days ago
light_hue_1|7 days ago
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|7 days 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|7 days ago
Good god, we may just be able to save America!
spiderfarmer|7 days ago
JamesLeonis|7 days ago
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-20...
[pushed offshore]:
- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...
- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...
[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...
[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...
[collapsed]:
- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...
- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...
- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...
[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...
NimrodKramer|7 days ago
[deleted]
MrJobbo|7 days ago
whattheheckheck|7 days ago