Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future.
1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics
2. people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly
3. tech execs hired into the org have relationships with major h1 placement agencies and place from those exclusively, the jobs are advertised with impossible requirements and then quickly sent to h1 pools
4. it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work" -- what was the point of grinding thru 12yrs of intense schooling if you were going to throw the kids under the bus when they graduate?
5. ai is part of it, perhaps for certain jobs, but it isnt AI causing the issues in technology
>While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics
100% this. What you save in dollars is spent in time. Not just more documentation requirements, not just more meetings, not just changing your schedule to work early or late in crunch times, but way more time resolving obvious, easy issues.
If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...
It depends on if you work for a good company or not.
Several times a year I have to make a decision about the direction and handling of projects based on how many hours it will take, divided into my salary.
Salaried workers aren't free labor. Wasting their time means they're not doing something more useful, and likely more profitable, for the company.
You're not wrong, but a well run company would have cost targets for a project, and the longer you are paying people (salary or not) to work on something, the more it costs and your staff aren't working on the next thing. So now it's $ plus opportunity cost.
It's not even H1Bs, all of Big Tech is shifting jobs in bulk to their offshore development centers. It may not necessarily be overt layoffs and increased hiring there, but simply through un-backfilled attrition in the US while maintaining headcount overseas. As a sibling comment mentions, this is simply because that is even cheaper than hiring a H1B, and probably has fewer strings attached.
The trick is that they increasingly outsource not just individual projects, but entire business or technical domains. This significantly reduces the communication and collaboration overhead, as each project does not need to be babysat. They typically have trusted, effective, high-agency leadership (often senior folks who have relocated back to their home country) that take broad strategic direction and execute on it locally.
Of course, there is still a lot of cross time-zone collaboration due to technical dependencies across geos, but that is limited due to a strong push to make all infrastructure "self-serve" (microservices yay!)
I think the shift started spiking shortly after the pandemic when companies realized fully remote work can work well, even across timezones. I am not sure what data the execs saw, but they all seemed to decide on this strategy at the same time.
Software Engineers need to get involved politically and demand regulations that systems that are critical for national security be developed by residents of the US on US soil by actual people with the right qualifications.
Qualifications are an interesting one, because they seem to be something that gets very little regard the development space.
Other areas like IT security or systems/network administration have tons of different qualifications/certifications that you can take, aligned to specific roles and career paths. Whether they're actually any good is another question - but at least there is some kind of structure there. And there are some attempts being made to further formalise it, with bodies like the UK Cyber Security Council establishing a professional register and chartership status.
But I don't think I've never met a developer who's talked about any programming-related certifications that they have. I'm sure that there must be some out there, but they don't seem to be widely used or respected.
And I suspect that any attempt to formalise the industry and require people to get certified to specific standards would result in a lot of pushback.
High paying jobs? yes. Good jobs? no. The organizations are typically dysfunctional and all of the things that the original comment here lead to really poor working environments and burnout.
I would describe a poor office environment as an open one. Cubicles are much better, and offices a little better than that.
These are not just unproductive environments, they're unpleasant. Having to be "on" for 8 hours a day because you don't even get a vague idea of privacy is exhausting.
Have you ever worked in a factory or restaurant or construction job site? I understand that some office environments aren't great for knowledge work but complaints about poor working conditions are a bit overblown.
A bit overblown? I literally could not do my work in the working environment I was supposed to (open space) because of the constant noise from coworkers. That was at a time when ANC technology wasn't very good and I left for this and other reasons.
This. I quit a very high-paying job at a very well-known tech company because they shifted to an open office environment. It was not only exceedingly unpleasant, but it eliminated my ability to work.
I find that hard to believe. Some of the mechanical engineers that I know do much of their work out on factory floors that are constantly noisier than any office. And I guarantee that what they're doing is at least as complex and intellectually challenging as anything you've ever done.
I'm all for improved working conditions but some software developers are entirely too precious. What we do isn't special.
You sound exactly like a manager that would put everyone into a open space and then could not understand why the productivity goes down like a rock. Yeah, people told you and you chose to ignore them.
Why are you gatekeeping what constitutes poor working conditions?
There are people all over the technology sector that suffer from various issues that make the “modern” office an absolutely unproductive, overwhelming shitshow.
You might also be frustrated if you’re asked to meet unreasonable goals in an environment where you can’t get anything done, at a company that doesn’t give you any options or agency over your work space.
It’s not the workplace suffering olympics. We don’t need to figure out whose cornering the market on bad working conditions to acknowledge that that issue spans industries.
The difference is that tech acts like it doesn’t have this issue. Other industries openly acknowledge they practice this and so expectations are set accordingly.
> it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work"
I agree, but at the same time this is what we told truck drivers when self driving cars was going to take over like a decade ago ("reskill, and at your own dime"). Kind of karma. Capitalism doesn't care unfortunately.
We should replace manual work with automation we shouldn't chop off the tree of industry knowing we will continue to need non entry level knowledge workers after current workers retire.
Also the we haven't actually replaced truck driver's at this point so nobody was actually told to reskill on their own dime yet and the "we" that specuated on this point is largely merely pragmatic.
> people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly
I've funded and worked at a number of companies in the Enterprise SaaS space, and that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee.
At that point I may as well fully offshore to a GCC.
))) Yeah that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee.
It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
> It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
and also the carrot of actual sponsorship. two paths to motivation.
and some will get made into full-timers -- I've seen it -- but it just centralizes control
If it's control, you get the same in CEE and India with restrictive non-compete clauses that would make Illinois look like an open market, frivolous lawsuits, and no-objection certificates. Control doesn't impact my bottom line.
Reality is, H1B hiring is just as impacted as normal hiring in the US.
If you were right, we wouldnt have millions of h1s being hired in the US.
You cant have offshore workers away from family, alone in a foreign country, with an RTO mandate, and glued to a desk in SF, constantly worried about deportation. This is about control, power, and abuse.
I just googled and in 2024 there >200k approvals for Indian nationals. That’s one year, one source country. And I believe that’s capped. Over time, it must be millions.
When shits tight H1B should be the first thing impacted. Whole point of the program is that there is a supposed lack of supply. Nevermind though because the whole thing has become a machine of bribes grift and kickbacks. No wonder you would jump to its defense as a beneficiary of the machine.
If you look at statistics for typical IT offshoring and near shoring markets like India, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria they have been in crisis since 2022. Only to show a slight rebound in Q1 of 2025.
On the other hand, here in Latin America, the offshore/nearshore jobs have been increasing in the last couple of years.
Source: LinkedIn spam, and a couple of past jobs I've worked have been for nearshore companies.
Here are some data points specific on IT. Back from 2023 until more recently, although as I said there is an uptick for 2025. For general statistics I like:
https://tradingeconomics.com/
"..The sector's share of Polish GDP and the value of exports per employee increased significantly despite the fact that at the same time the growth rate of employment slowed down. And while these changes were anticipated, this is a new situation. Until now, all three indicators have been correlated quite strongly.." - https://absl.pl/en/news/p/new-phase-growth-modern-business-s...
Whenever this topic turns to AI in media, I like to say that AI isn't going to destroy culture, the destructive force against culture (i.e. Big Hollywood) is going to use AI to do it.
Most of this is not occurring due to AI or offshoring, that's just what's told to investors. In reality, it's the macroeconomic climate that has shifted since a few years ago, namely Section 174 changes for amortization of R&D expenditures, overhiring during covid, and higher Fed rates.
The only real answer. AI is the current scapegoat for any self-inflicted short sightedness, like the 0% interest rate over-hiring times of 2020-2021. Why blame yourself as a company when you can blame the loudest current news and market hype wave?
And not just blame but make your stock price go up saying you'll replace all your developers (even though that won't happen for another 20 years, if ever).
Section 174 was very unpopular when it came out and many people raised the alarm over it (although that seems to have simmered down over time.) If hiring was impacted by that, a lot of execs would be very vocal about it to increase public pressure on getting it reversed, no?
In the mid aughts I decided against computer science as a major based on media forecasts of offshoring destroying the market for programmers.
That was a mistake. I ended up a programmer anyway, just with a degree that didn’t really prepare me for it.
As for the data, starting with 2019 is going to skew things. In 2022-2023 things went sideways and many big tech employers didn’t extend any intern offers or didn’t even have interns.
This also feels like yet another boom-bust cycle to me.
During the boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. After the dot com bust, many people avoided CS because such jobs evaporated.
This cycle will be a bit worse because four things are hitting simultaneously: (1) Hangover from idiot over hiring during COVID (2) AI is going to replace a lot of incumbent businesses with startups (3) The real economy shows every sign of collapsing due to the trade wars (4) The US is intentionally giving up its position as the best country for skilled workers to move to.
I can’t say what will happen with (4), but it seems unlikely (3) is going to win many elections for the incumbents.
Anyway, this year, firms are probably going to be simultaneously too conservative (eliminating job positions instead of retraining people to use AI with more aggressive product targets) and too aggressive (betting the magic AI genie will grant middle management’s wishes and also somehow not simultaneously commoditize all the stuff it automates away).
Anyway, I think there’s plenty of opportunity this year for any company that’s borderline competent. My personal experience with middle-manager-dominated large firms makes me pessimistic about their futures.
> During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs.
This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away.
Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset.
It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that.
On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
I really identify with your first paragraph. I enjoyed writing for the school paper and programing in high school, but I didn't see much of a future in either, for different reasons (death of print and offshoring). I graduated around the time that 538 launched a new appreciation for data-driven journalism, so maybe I could have been in a good position.
I ended up running the data science division at a digital publisher, so I guess I backed into that space after all.
I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong internship experience from a top 10 engineering college.
Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there.
Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.
I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career.
A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
Government funded schools with lower tuition (possibly even community college), more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering), trade schools/apprenticeships.
> more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering)
this is the dumbest thing ever. first off, they already chased degrees that paid better -- they went STEM.
secondly, things change a lot in 4 years. the 2020 college freshman is now getting screwed for choosing STEM right now, today. 4 years ago it was a good choice, 2 years ago it was shaky, and now it's a mess.
medicine is also certainly not a solution, as programs are extremely competitive and take 8+ years to complete from undergrad through residency. and not all medical fields are magically lucrative or in demand.
Not all STEM are equal. I would be surprised if significant numbers of electrical/chemical/civil/mechanical engineers are unemployed.
But the more important thing is if tuition and other expenses are low (which they are if one goes to state school or community college for first 2 years), then even a different job can provide enough income to service debt.
Why are the relative difficulties relevant? Either way, those career options offer stable, recurring cash flow of at least 50th percentile income, with PA offering even more.
You started by saying people shouldn't take on large amounts of debt for questionable return. Now you are saying they should take on medium amounts of debt for questionable return. All while ignoring the questionable return part.
I do not see how I am ignoring the questionable return part. There is lots of data on which educational investments result in more stable cash flow vs less stable cash flow.
These same conversations were being had 20+ years ago when I was in college.
Technically, the term wasn't about money at the beginning, but I think by the 1990s and 2000s, when people started borrowing tens of thousands of dollars per year from federal taxpayers, it became more about the ROI.
> There is lots of data on which educational investments result in more stable cash flow vs less stable cash flow.
The whole point of the comment you replied to was that this data is now wrong, as capital has continued to rug pull industries however it benefits them. So, once again, people can analyze all the data and make the "correct" decision and then still wind up in 40k of debt and no good job prospects.
Yes, but $40k of debt amortized over 20 years is not disabling. Plenty of jobs, even towards the lowest wages offered in most metros (which is $15+) can still allow for one to make progress.
The point is going $160k in debt at a private or out of state school can disable you.
You will have to somehow live on the remaining $1700 you take home after taxes and loan payment in cities where the rent for really shitty studios is about that and they want you to make 3x the rent to live indoors.
It's possible that you like most people who are living off much more than the minimum have no idea how ridiculously hard it is at the bottom.
If a person is earning $15/hour for 20 of their prime years with no upward movement, then they should never have borrowed money to go to school.
They also shouldn’t be in Manhattan or Seattle or any other tier 1 city, there are plenty of cheaper cities with cheaper suburbs that pay $15+ per hour. There is also the military if one wants college without spending the cash.
A friend of mine got out of the military before we started working together. He is permanently partially disabled and most of the people he directly served with killed themselves because kicking down doors and shooting people is psychologically destructive.
Also present inductees will basically serve under a fascist dictator who wants to use the military to murder people.
That said the idea that poor people ought to move somewhere cheaper deserves attention.
1. Poor people who aren't literally homeless are the least mobile folks. They have difficulty moving in town because they can't come up with 3 months rent let alone money to move across the country and they are incredibly risk intolerant as they often can't afford for even one partner to be out of work for any length of time. Furthermore losing access to local resources might itself be calamitous. There is no replacing moms babysitting with paid for childcare.
2. Entanglements. People have connections, friendships, family, love interests. Without these people often fare worse.
3. Wages descend almost as fast as rent, job opportunities go down faster and most everything else stays about the same. Nobody invests 5000 and risks becoming a hobo in hopes of netting 150 a month in another minimim wage job in a shittier City.
4. Low wage jobs are in fact done by all sorts of people in all sorts of stages of their life and cities depend on those people to function. It's not clear how any tier one city should continue to function after all the people who should not be there leave
5. The idea hardly scales. People live where the jobs are now and those places are only cheaper now because they lack those economic opportunities.
Becoming self-taught? Currently I'm learning POSIX shell scripting and installing OpenBSD and FreeBSD in my local VMs on the weekends, and since AI is helping me, I'm able to gain 3 to 4 times more experience than I would otherwise have gained.
All of those skills might come in handy in the future.
There is a very valid point you are mostly sticking to, but your last sentence is essentially "employers admire people who don't complain", which I'm going to have to push back on. Yes, not complaining is an excellent principle to have generally, but it matters why something bad is happening. A large proportion of people don't just think the economy is bad because, well, it happens, we're all trying our best - they see people and policies making it bad. There is a huge conversation about the details and realities of that perception, but that's irrelevant to the perception's existence.
For example:
If I am underpaid and overworked because my employer and I and all the people doing their best for the economy are all suffering together under unavoidable circumstances, I am going to stay tough, keep my head up, count my blessings, etc.
If I am underpaid and overworked because policy-makers are enabling it and our employers are deciding to shift a disproportionate share of the societal suffering onto employees and we are all allowing a culture of overwork and underpayment to seep in - I'm going to do something you are uncharitably describing as "wailing".
What can easily happen is that you take the shit work to survive but it takes so much of your time and so much out of you and you fall behind and miss opportunities and it becomes impossible to climb out of the hole.
> Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there.
You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens.
Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max?
If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
It would be nice if society will help you, but you should expect that they will not, especially if you are a childless adult which is the one class of people society will actually tax back below the poverty line.
>> you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground.
> ...which is literally never the correct answer.
But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions?
Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just spreading that "love" to those groups. Those groups should be threatened with that, because otherwise they're not going to restrain themselves.
You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.
> You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.
Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
There are also a lot of people totally oblivious to the local minima locations of the working class life. Like the fact that a young, elderly, or childless person may be able to realize the benefits of revolution for either themselves or at least their unborn or adult children, a very large segment of middle age society has young children who paradoxically would be better off from the revolution but may be more likely to die in the process than others due to the fact they cannot survive the thin margins of survival that the others can survive on during a lean revolutionary time.
Given that born young children can die but unborn children cannot, and that adult children are more resilient, the middle age worker have always been some of the most resistant to revolution, but not because they are bootlickers.
> the middle age worker have always been some of the most resistant to revolution, but not because they are bootlickers.
That may be true generally, but not here. It's typically bootlickers who read a few libertarian economists and have let themselves be tricked into thinking 401k means they should want the same thins as a capitalist tycoon.
And I'm not so much advocating for an actual violent revolution than for the fear of one. And definitely not the kind of passivity advocated up-thread, that counsels acceptance that tycoons (real and wannabe) driving over any plans a pleb has for a comfortable life. Don't do that, much better to do something like vote for some psycho who'll bomb all the TMSC fabs and AI datacenters to do a rug-pull over the tycoon's plans to shrink the middle class even more with greater automation.
I don't know that it's the wrong answer, but I am not flippantly going to go tell someone to go get machine gunned by the national guard, especially when I won't be joining them.
If they are going to come to that conclusion, I'll let them get to that on their own.
The vast majority of trees are planted because the value of a sapling ismore than a seedling. It doesn't matter that you will never know the shade, and that the sapling is worthless for industrial purposes, you can profit quite quickly.
To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.
I respect that. I graduated during the Great Recession. Ended up working for extremely low wages out of college and ultimately went to grad school after getting nowhere in trying to find a better position.
For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in uni even if this alone may not bring them a guaranteed leg up over the competition when they face the adult working world.
My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference.
Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.
A lot of truth to that. Although I graduated well after the dot com days, at that time you usually had to be near the top just to get an internship. You could probably let academics slip a bit after that.
Please stop with this nonsense you can 'work your way up' or that if only you work hard enough your efforts will be rewarded. That's long, long gone.
Companies don't care if you work hard or not. You're disposable to them. If you work hard, you only get given more work. By turning employment into "gig" work, they've shifted as much of the risk and costs onto workers, too.
Companies have weaponized employment practices and now they're just burning everything to the ground because they figure there will always be someone desperate enough. Turns out that doesn't quite work - Amazon for example has had internal memos circulating that say in various communities they're pissing off or injuring so many people they are having trouble finding workers.
"Gig" companies care so little, will suspend or cancel workers at the drop of a hat, intentionally or unintentionally. Even Uber's CEO, when he tried going 'undercover' as a driver to see what it was like, admitted he was scared he'd get a less than 5 star rating because it almost instantly torpedos you, especially if you're new. Because the "customer is always right", these companies offer no way to challenge a customer's complaint even if it's obvious nonsense. Why investigate anything, which costs money, if you've got a long line of people desperate to make $6 delivering a cheesebuger 5 miles?
Our legislators let silicon valley roll right over a century worth of worker protections because it was "innovative" (ie they got lots of lobbyist cash.) Voters let them do it because they want their delivered cheeseburger, groceries or makeup as cheap as possible....and voters don't care about the "losers" who work those jobs. It's not them, after all...
>I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.
That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions.
Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
The key thing that I feel often gets overlooked in these discussions is that those offshore people are using AI tools as well. It's not "AI or offshoring", it's "offshoring to AI".
Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work.
Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
In 2010 I sat in a meet with an exec from an NYC investment bank with my boss, the ceo of a boutique (not Indians ..) outsourcing consultancy. We were in his office and outside was an entire empty floor of cubicles. He casually mentioned how the outsourced work is "crap" and how they usually end up having to redo the projects up to 3 times. He then went on to say how they outsourced "this floor" and their plans for outsourcing the other floors.
The economic equation never made any sense. There is, imo, a geopolitical element to the outsourcing pheonomena in context of software and India (which btw was spearheaded by MorganStanley and friends) back in late '90s: India used to be firmly in the non-aligned group and has had long standing pseudo-aliance with USSR/Russians. Giving the IT sector to India was part of the carrot to get India to shift to the West. China got the manufacturing, India got the software.
It's disappointing any solution to this issue will easily be 5-10 years away, leaving the rest of us plebeians to grapple with the consequences in the meantime.
Plus any solution that increases pay for entry-level workers necessarily costs employers more than the peanuts they currently pay workers overseas, so they'll bitch and moan as hard as they can to turn public interest against any politician that tries.
Really feels like we're just sitting ducks while other countries get their act together acting as hubs of innovation that already had far more varied industries across the board to begin with.
I think keeping an entire generation away from good jobs will result in far worse things in 5-10 years. Unfortunately we’re too greedy and stupid to care. Whatever profits us now is all that matters. We get what we deserve in the end.
Probably also a bad convergence with an oversupply of entry-level job-seekers. Kids have been flooding into computer science, data science, and other info-tech fields the past few years. Universities have also been constructing easier paths than the traditional Computer Science degree so that more students can enroll and complete a degree. Now they are graduating and there are more people seeking fewer jobs.
Offshoring to people who use AI, and are now much more productive and can produce high-quality written output.
If a junior role can be done with ChatGPT and CoPilot, why pay a western salary for it when you can pay someone a fraction of the salary to use the same thing?
Most succinct answer to this general concern I've seen in months.
It's business. Less dollars paid out for the same LLM content that the managers know the developers will produce in any case. Foolish to pay more for essentially the same LLM response.
Because eventually you're going to need a senior dev who actually has an understanding of the underlying system, when the one you have retires. The human junior will eventually become that, while it would be foolish to rely on the inevitability of LLMs getting there in time.
Of course, this only matters if you give half a rat's ass about whether the company is going to be solvent in a decade. If your management strategy is "pump metrics for bonuses and bail before they notice" then potayto potahto I suppose...
Even if you are thinking long term though, it's a big risk investing in training up a junior, because the culture of have a "job for life" that previous generations had is pretty much gone. People nowadys are much more likely to jump between companies than to still be in the same place a decade later, so there's every chance that the money you spending training up a junior will just benefit whoever hires them in a few years down the line.
And sure, people say "well just pay them more" - but most businesses are never going to be able to match the salaries that the FAANGs and VC backed companies can - so training juniors has turned into a big gamble for them.
Which is terrible for the industry long-term, but in the short term it's not really in any single company's interest to try and change that.
fwiw this happens regardless of AI or offshoring or whatever. my old employer was bought out, and the senior staff trickled out the door over the years as the working environment got more frustrating. i heard from a friend who still works there that the product has been having "rolling brownouts" for months that "nobody can figure out" which sounds exceedingly bleak - it's just a saas product for crying out loud.
so you're right - but whether it's AI/offshoring with layoffs, or just regular churn with no plan to train people up to replace the knowledge that leaves, the result is the same, which is a degraded product that eventually falls apart. and yea, who cares if you're not in it for the long haul.
If often does - but it's a new grad in India or Bangladesh or Indonesia or somewhere else that costs a fraction of what a new grad would cost in a western country, and who can be "fired" at with no notice or rights.
You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k
In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India
Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad.
Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.
80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing.
The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
That doesn't help with the tax incentives which is a major driver for why you are seeing significant offshoring.
Plenty of major tech hubs in CEE and India give 80-100% tax rebates or PLIs to foreign companies opening and hiring locally IF they also mandate RTO in those offices.
They tend to recover the cost through income tax and VAT.
At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost, all you have to do is operate on a competitive basis against people with similar level of education, skill, and the unfortunately highly valuable 1st world cultural and language integration.
Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India.
> Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India
The model used by India is the exact same as that used in Romania, Poland, Czechia, Costa Rica, Israel, and other countries.
Having a couple digital nomad contractors works fine for small organizations, but once you break the 300+ number, that's when you start seeing the kind of tax optimizations I mentioned above kicking in.
> At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost
That's the point. Wages don't play a significant role inasmuch as the tax optimization. And that's where the issue kicks in at scale.
A few years back somebody on Reddit posted a spreadsheet with tech companies that were hiring SWEs at that time, so to try and help my wife who's been hunting since her arrival in the states in October I decided to revisit last week. It was downright demoralizing how many companies (assuming they still existed) were only hiring for positions in Indian or LATAM offices. If I had to put a figure on it I'd say it was greater than 80% of the companies I looked at.
Increasing efficiency doesn't necessarily reduce the number of jobs needed. Like the switch from programming in assembly language to high-level languages increased efficiency more than 20% but the number of developer jobs also greatly increased during that period. The demand for software is effectively infinite so in the past efficiency improvements just meant that more software was built.
Huh, somehow disagreeing with me has softened your claim of "infinity". Yes it still goes up but you think that goes on forever? I just don't see it, more and more tech appears as complexity introduced for its own sake not for any sort of service to the end user. Why is that? Building moats around companies, building moats around your own job, none of that serves the end user. Eventually someone comes along to eat your ossified asses lunch. Eventually people check out from the digital world whether through sheer genetics or finally waking up to the blight.
There is effectively an infinite amount of software that people would like to have if it was free, thus infinite demand. This is fundamentally different from physical commodities: pretty much everyone wants some wheat, but there are physical limits to how much wheat we can consume which ultimately constrains demand.
Lowering the cost of software development just means that more software will be developed. Despite your unhinged little rant there is zero evidence that the number of employed software developers will decline over the long term. Numbers fluctuate from year to year but you haven't provided any evidence for a change in the historical patterns.
A new grad in Asia with AI access is just as good as a new grad in the US. Only way cheaper in the long run.
Where will we get experienced seniors in 20 years? Well first, will we even need theme? Will AI's be able to replace even seniors by that point? I mean, I'd put money on "Yes" to that question. Even if you're thinking "No", I mean the kids we're hiring now in Asia will be that much better in 20 years. And will be fluent with AI technologies and have a facility with them that we can only imagine today. Not only that, the AI's will be 20 years better.
I'm not sure that software development is a good long term plan for a young person in the US right now. Just being honest. Better to use what you know about software right now to try to start your own digital service of some kind. Just my 2 cents though. I could be totally off.
A common trend with manufacturing has been to offshore production, mechanize the domestic systems, and then repatriate with a fraction of the staff. Bonus points if you let the government woo you into coming back with tax breaks.
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
There are many industries where you need lots of experience before you're a net contributor to productivity. This is true for everything from hairdressers to doctors. We have ways of dealing with this (eg. taking out loans to undergo years of training).
The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
I think the solution is the same as it was in previous cases. Extend the education and make it more accessible so you can reach useful skill level before you dirty your hands with commercial work.
In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
Which leads to the obvious question of: who's footing the bill for this?
Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?
Not who, what. Most of the value in the economy is not produced by humans for a long time already. Most wealth comes from machines. So they need to be footing the bill instead of just lining pockets of people who bought the machines.
This used to be addressed by the fact that people were loyal to companies - so it was in the company's interest to spend years training them up investing in them, with the knowledge that they might get decades of productive work out of them afterwards. One of my grandparents joined a company as an apprentice as 16, got trained by them, and then worked there for 40 years until retirement.
But nowadys with the culture being much more to to repeatedly jump between companies looking for salary increases, there's a lot less incentive to train juniors - because odds are they're just going to get poached or jump ship before that investment has really paid off.
The big companies or startups with VC funding and deep pockets will always be able to hire experienced people - but it's going to become increasingly hard for other people (and particularly public sector and nonprofits) to do so, as the pipeline of juniors -> seniors is being eroded.
I'm sure you can find plenty of example of both. But TBH, I don't think it really matters which side you try and point the finger at after decades of decline - the point is that the employee/employer relationship has fundamentally changed, and it's hard to see it ever changing back.
Agreed. It's not about blame, just that employers are almost always working with a better perspective and more information.
Business circumstances made it advantageous, and then necessary, to break the social contract.
It might be possible to go back, but I can't imagine any series of events that leads in that direction which doesn't break the global economy in the process.
That's such a valid concern, and I think it applies across many industries — including home decor and interior design. While AI tools can suggest layouts or color palettes instantly, what really matters is human intuition, creativity, and an understanding of client emotions something that only comes with real-world experience.
At smithinteriors, we often balance AI-driven tools with hands-on creative insights. But we also believe in giving junior designers a chance to learn and grow, because without mentorship and opportunity, there’ll never be enough experienced professionals in the future. It’s all about creating an environment where AI supports human creativity, not replaces it.
Perhaps by juniors banding together and making new startups which outcompete the dinosaurs - a tale as old as time (or tech startup capitalism, anyway, so since the 1990s).
I used to pay $125k standard to entry level SWEs back in the 2020-2022 COVID days, fully remote, great benefits. Can hire the same now for $90k, great candidates with good internships, CS degree, etc.
But lately I just hire 5+ year experience because there are so many available now, and the cost for them has gone down also.
The industry feels so much more mature, in a bad way. We had such an exciting set of decades of making new software, new frameworks, finding out new ways to do things. Devs would be working on all kinds of exciting interesting personal matters. It was frontiers work, expanding possibility.
Everything feels so set now. Ever larger industry dominating ever more, with large scale software using established frameworks and technologies. Less vibrant scene of new and mid-life companies, still with exciting things brewing.
I struggle to elaborate why I feel it, but the lack of vibrancy, the lack of spark within the industry feels like it would lead so directly to these conditions of there being less entry-level jobs.
I think the lack of spark is because the cutting edge is LLMs that cost billions to train and operate. Eliminates the possibility of Ramen profitable startups.
“Prompt engineering“ isn’t exactly a defensible moat.
>The key difference, he said, is that the iterative process to make AI code better takes minutes, while a junior coder might need days for the same task.
Your Sr engineer is also still distracted and focused on those tasks.
Junior engineers come up with new ideas, can eventually put the whole system together. There's never just one code base.
What Ai tools are replacing engineers? I finay tried cursors free tier yesterday and it right off the bat misunderstood my code and made up library implementation details.
I always had hard times finding a job with every job search I did. Even living in San Francisco
I expect current AI models to behave like an L1 or L2 at a big tech company, where they will eventually fire you unless you reach L4.
The only reason they’re useful is that, unlike a human, they can be summoned in under a second and you can’t hurt their feelings by rewriting 100% of their stuff.
They should tell this to the MS employees that very publicly needed to hand hold the .NET junior coder AI repeatedly the other day. This is exactly the kind of hubris people were angry about.
Its not AI, its the economy. Almost 100k US tech layoffs in 2024 and 55k already in 2025. I know it's not showing in the US unemployment statistics yet...I judge because of the relabeling. CCIE's become Tech Support engineers, Junior Developers become Uber drivers..
How about something like a NOC tech [1]? You can't AI that one yet I don't think. Also it's still a generally good foot-in-the-door, even for grads who might initially dismiss it as lower-than-thou (I mainly see it as a great starting point because of the fundamentals you will learn that are invaluable and will carry you through your career more than one would imagine). You just have to "work for it" and scrape your way up a bit more, sure-- but I mean, you kinda always have to do this when you are first starting out, no?
Can sort of confirm that. Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now. Whilst there is some very obvious evaluations going on of replacing juniors with <insert your favourite llm>, it's quite obviously not there yet but management level interest is off the charts.
We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion.
))) Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now.
Once the next year of grads come, it is a wipe-out, because you now have multiple years of graduates competing for the same one position. Also, you often dont want damaged goods -- better to hire the fresh grad from this year's batch than a grad from 1 or 2yrs ago who has been unemployed.
No counter point there. It's a real issue, and I don't know how to handle it. There is also an issue of the current world not being in a very investment heavy mood - unless you're talking military...
Well, in that case, if I may draw a stereotype, there’s a simple solution:
“If there’s a data breach, and a significant percentage of your programmers are offshore, penalties double.”
We all generally agree here that while some talent is excellent, the majority of companies outsource to the cheapest (or 2nd cheapest, just to be safe) option possible. Turn that into a calculated risk - if you hire a company and their sloppiness causes a data breach, that's on you with heavy penalties for negligence for not validating their work - not the company you hired.
Change the law so that if Bank of America hires Infosys, and Infosys outsources to some sweatshop, Bank of America is the one who must be directly held responsible for a failure.
Agreed. And if it turns out there is no LLM riding in to rescue companies in need of new talent, the engineers who remain will be in very high demand indeed.
Definitely agree. I blame educational institutions (I know, they can't do much without enough freedom + budget) for not advocating enough to our democratic responsabilities. I do wish we adapted some stuff from early history (Athens to be precise) - democratic participants got a very low base salary, and they also could vote to ban people from democratic participation (and hence the city) whenever they got too power hungry. Seems like a loss of responsibility allows too much incompetence to prevail.
The data disagrees. Here’s a graph of private sector spending on new factories in the US. 2020-2024 blows every time period out of the water since 1975.
Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in:
Exploitation has really nice results in the short term, meaning that it also increases one's ability to compete. If the playing field is not leveled for every player by hindering exploitation via regulation, exploitation will be the name of the game. Not just because of greed, but of course greed helps; but because of survival.
Grads, it's not the seasoned workers, or automation. It's the incentives that drive the whole thing. And the people in charge of those incentives, and the context that created those, and the culture that supports all of it.
I remember seeing someone make a joke that COVID-19 never happened, and the evidence that they cited was that people keep making arguments that obviously, clearly do not incorporate several years of global pandemic, lockdowns, deaths, hirings, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have more evidence for that right here with the article citing a 50% drop in new grad hires since 2019 as if 2020-2024 was a nice linear-ish change over time we can extrapolate over.
Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII?
If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US.
Concretely: Silicon Valley’s white collar workers are 66% first generation immigrants, and it’s the 4th largest economy on earth. (The US, including Silicon Valley, is number one). Just about all of my native born coworkers moved here for work.
All that needs to change. The glue to the US economy needs to be Americans. We have the best universities in the world but we decide to invest in foreign students instead of our own for wage reasons.
It just so obviously doesn’t, and even more obviously won’t. A pool of 9 billion > 340 million is a simple, hard reality that has trivially curb stomped any and all opposition since the dawning of the human race with the only variable being time-to-acceptance.
No real problem. By the same amount, young people are smarter and more competent, in particular regarding tech topics.
At least that's the dominant narrative since a decade. And I'm sure it's actually true, and least when the question is about knowing all youtokgram memes of the day.
There’s plenty of entry level jobs in AI itself. For some reason, many tech grads still refuse to reskill into AI itself. Ironic for a field that prides itself on how fast moving it is.
The answer to this is easy. Rewind time and put a 200K minimum salary on visa talent, and ban products sold here to utilize overseas employees. Sell it here, you build it here. Then you have all the jobs you need and more.
To fix it today, you do the same thing. But you'd have to also cancel all the visas, and invalidate citizenship that was founded on fraud. Not much more to this story, if your concern is having jobs in the USA for people already here.
Denaturalization has always been done and nothing new. The US government can revoke citizenship for those who obtained it fraudulently. This can happen if an individual made false statements or concealed material facts during the naturalization process. The government must prove "clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence" of fraud to succeed in a denaturalization case. I'd expect more of this going forward.
And what does this have to do with a visa worker? Nothing. It's the government that allow lax policies for work visas. The fault here is not the worker's.
I was responding to you. So you tell me. You did not mention H1Bs so I did not address that concern. You asked me about denaturalization and I gave you the answer to that.
I'm open to discussing visas if you wish, but I did not imply there was a connection between denaturalization and cancelling visas. These are two distinct avenues for removing excess resources from the American labor pool. The only connection between those two groups is that both do place a downward effect on our wages.
When you use the word "our", it's supposed to refer to US citizens. Once a person is a citizen, they are a part of this group. To want to denaturalize anyone means your quest is not rooted in a rational separation of who belongs and who doesn't. Maybe someone will want to denaturalize you and show you the door just the same, so how about that.
None of those concerns typically apply with regard to international workers gaining citizenship. Practically all of them gain them lawfully, and with great difficulty too. For all intents and purposes, it is irrelevant to the matter at hand of employment of citizens. The point is the laws of revocation of naturalization alone will not get you or me a better job.
In contrast, just the simple act of eliminating non-PhD work visas could fix the situation, but politicians work for corporations, not for the people.
I don't disagree with that. Though some did lie on their resumes to get jobs to attain the visas, AI could be used to flag unworthy recent citizens that committed fraud from overseas to attain their citizenship. My wife immigrated without committing fraud and is even more New Right than I am, so there's that. She wants this country preserved, and improved. Not overwhelmed and ultimately degraded. People make a place, and changing those people will change the place. It's how the world works.
I would also be willing to accept alternatives, such as the creation of a new Protected Class. Settler Status, which would be granted to all children from a direct paternal line going back to the American Revolution or before for the descendants of native Americans who at that time were from Europe, and did the actual sacrifice of pioneering the wild and settled the land. If you believe new immigrants experienced hardship, try Pennsylvania in 1750. Today an immigrant that faces "hardship" as you put it, is soft as a feather. Just taking advantage of this country without truly contributing. Again, Google might be happy but my concern is not Google Inc. If those with Settler Status were granted permanent job preference over non-Settler Status individuals, that would rectify the injustice and abuse of our legal immigration system, and the blind eye towards illegal immigration.
The way they usually get a job is by first getting higher education in the US, so lying on the resume of any experience abroad doesn't really factor in. The job is mainly on the basis of the domestic education, not the foreign experience. Foreign work experience alone doesn't carry much if any weight for getting employment in the US.
The US is supposed to be a free country without any protected class either way. In the same way that I wouldn't support a protected class for descendants of slavery, I wouldn't for any settlers either.
The hardship faced by immigrants now have to do with with the stability of their visa, which is something that settlers never had to put up with. It is not a joke to be chronically stressed by whether one is at risk of losing one's legal status, also waiting for years for their paperwork to process. These are stresses that people like you and I never experienced first-hand.
I believe in merit-based employment and in training of citizens, without favoritism of any kind. As for work visas, I have already noted that they should be limited to those with a PhD (except for farm labor), and this will eliminate much of job-related concerns that people like you and I might have. Taking extremist ring-wing positions is not only unnecessary, but it opens the door down the road to someone eventually classifying you as not being sufficiently righteous.
Note also that one benefit that citizens already have over visa workers is that citizens have more possibilities for entrepreneurial activities without being encumbered by work restrictions.
It is obvious that your beliefs are extremely racist, and they will find zero sympathy from me. I am perfectly okay with sending work visa holders back, but independent of race, not because of it. As for naturalized citizens, they have already sworn their oath to the Constitution; this is something that birthright citizens never even have to do.
Trump is not doing anything with regard to limiting work visas or instituting salary requirements as you want them. He cares about himself, his family, and no one else. He is striving to take away Medicaid and SNAP from Americans who need it, putting them in extreme jeopardy. He also doesn't care if people have to pay a lot more for goods that are made domestically when they could be made cheaply abroad for a third of the cost. If he actually cared about the people, he wouldn't waste money on tax cuts for the rich as he just did. He would ensure that all citizens get the professional training they needed to thrive in the jobs that are available today. And yes, he would end most work visas, but being how crooked he actually is, he won't ever do it.
When someone will want to denaturalize you for criteria that suits them but not you, maybe then you will understand. Being American is an idea, an ideal founded on mutually-respecting freedom; it is not restricted by race or ancestry. The original settlers were mainly from Siberia anyway. How would it make you feel if someone called for 90% of European people to be sent back to Europe? It would be equally justifiable. That's how you come across. After all, the descendants of the European settlers have poisoned America with irreversible PFAS contamination, with 5-10% of arable land no longer being suitable for growing any safe produce as a result.
I am neither left-wing nor right-wing. I probably am more Libertarian leaning with some restrictions. I see the pros and cons of both sides, and I know when certain viewpoints are not even self-consistent. Even if I were down to my last dollar, I would never want a privileged class for the simple reason that excessive privilege, on average, comes in the way of the struggle that fosters true self-development.
I am pretty sure the indigenous Siberian Americans disagree. They continue to see the Europeans as an unwelcome long-term occupation of their land.
I actually don't have a problem with racist beliefs because I think having them is quite natural. Acting on them, however, to discriminate or oppress, is what's wrong, hateful, and also illegal. In my libertarian playbook, the only correct avenues for race based decisions are when it comes to your private life, e.g. romance, and your private property. And the United States as a whole is not your private property.
It is apparent that wanting entitled and preferential treatment is something you deeply desire, without really having to work for it.
> Trump just got started.
Do Trump voters even read objective news? It is not evident that they do. They seem to read only right-wing news which hides from them that Trump works for the wealthy elite that paid for his campaign, not for the masses of people. Trump's recent actions of continued tax cuts favoring the rich speak to it. Oh and the wealthy elite absolutely want the worker visa system to continue.
The bigger risk to jobs in the years to come is from AI anyway. Those with a clue would do well to switch to self-employed or entrepreneurial activities.
Taxes suck. Most of it is wasted. Money is taken from productive people and productive money, and given to foreign countries. I completely support not taxing anyone, including the wealthy. Tariffs are a better way to fund the government and its crackpot programs.
I don't think any Indians are wanting us to leave, considering we gave them the gambling business and other monopolies. We are not their problem, we're their benefactors. Stupid people are always going to say things like "this is our land", when they were given reservations and largescale permanent handouts. It's just complaint culture. We've been amazingly gracious overlords. In fact, the entire west deserves a debt of gratitude, it's the only time in human history when a faction could have subjected the entire world to slavery and domination, but willingly gave it all up and most nations were so "enlightened" they chose not to. That will not be the outcome with a nation like China or most others. Most if not all these sorts of narratives are short sighted, spoiled, and just the Oppression Olympics. It's cool today to be the biggest loser because no one is actually oppressed or mistreated, but it's fun to play one on TV.
I completely agree that taxes are insane, but what I find particularly insane about it is there are so many of them: income, sales, property, payroll, inflation, tariffs. It would make sense to have just one form of it, probably just inflation or otherwise a population-normalized land ownership tax. An alternative tax could be minor gas fees on a government-managed privacy-enabled gold-weighted crypto coin.
Do you know how rich people actually spend their money? They squander most of it on frivolous nonsense. Most of them are not looking to improve the lives of other people, and they mostly just want the gravy to continue while they take their scheduled monthly vacation in a distant land. I wouldn't exactly call them productive people. The person making your food delivery at low wages is more productive. The person struggling with problems, working to solve them, also is productive.
As for the government, it has both good and bad programs. A simple metric to measure is -- could they increase the life expectancy of people cumulatively over the next one hundred years, and by how much? This is the ultimate metric really.
You continue with your entitled feeling, now at the national level, and it will be your downfall. The truth is that West (mostly the UK) is actually what divided too many countries quite arbitrarily and unfairly in the previous century, leading to many unnecessary wars between them, also sowing terrorism. There is nothing but contempt toward the West for these actions. Consider it good fortune that the US didn't do it.
Trump voters look to have zero capability for independent thought, as they always agree with what their master does, as if he can do no wrong.
Your beliefs are your own. Personally I would consider those beliefs to be a clown show for the most part with few exceptions.
GDP alone does nothing for the human condition. To me, productive actions are not those that increase GDP or the stock price, but those that improve the human condition. The rich have a moral obligation to fund activities that improve the human condition, preferably by themselves without governmental intervention. The alternative path is to destroy the planet with CO2, microplastics, and PFAS as we have been doing.
Tariffs are going to be a complete and utter failure due to the "first sale rule", and this rule is a just one that cannot go away either. Have you tried ordering anything from abroad lately? Odds are good that it will get stuck in Customs forever. Their system is utterly dysfunctional, more so than it was previously. Will Customs pay me interest on the cost for the time they hold my item? Why not?
If I take quality of life to be healthspan, meaning the length of a healthy life, then life expectancy absolutely drives it. The two are tightly interlinked. If instead you mean QoL to the size of your SUV, then it's true, it doesn't drive life expectancy.
Food is program too. In effect, you're not anti-program; you're just anti everything you don't understand or aren't even aware of.
Money doesn't solve problems for the vast majority of people who don't know how to use money to solve problems. It solves numerous problems for those who know how to use it intelligently. Pretty much the dumbest thing I have ever read on this site is money doesn't solve poverty. It solves that, and a lot more, including resolving trauma if ones knows how. It's true that most people waste their money, but the few that don't are the ones that matter.
It is not "entitled" to have certain expectations about the stability of the legal visa system. If one has been informed legally that action X will lead to result Y, then one purses the action. The feeling of entitlement comes in when one wants to bypass the action to get the result, like you do.
>Personally I would consider those beliefs to be a clown show for the most part with few exceptions.
You call my views a clown show, but I find your views just naive and childish. As well as antiquated. Just old school Marxism that has failed countless times, never once in history actually ending-well.
>The rich have a moral obligation to fund activities...CO2, microplastics, and PFAS as we have been doing...
The rich aren't responsible for microplastics and everything else. This is just silly thus I can't address it further.
>Tariffs are going to be a complete and utter failure due to the "first sale rule", ...
Tariffs are in use and have been by every other country in the world. This anti-Trump narrative that somehow they're only bad when Trump enacts them is something that no serious person could tolerate. I'm surprised those of you on the left are still reaching for this one. Tariffs work, and they worked in the USA 100 years ago before the personal income tax, which is truly a criminal policy. And not just because it's an unapportioned direct tax.
>Money doesn't solve problems for the vast majority of people who don't know how to use money to solve problems. It solves numerous problems for those who know how to use it intelligently.
Which is exactly why money hasn't solved any problems. Anyone prepared to handle money, earns it themselves and handles it. And that's why handing out money doesn't solve poverty. This is where your views are naive, if it were so easy- most of our problems would be solved by the Year of Our Lord 2025. Yet we're not even close, and took many steps back because of antiquated, backwards views like yours.
>It is not "entitled" to have certain expectations about the stability of the legal visa system.
Yes it is. We owe them nothing, that's why it's entitlement to have any expectations of someone else's country.
>entitlement comes in when one wants to bypass the action to get the result, like you do.
No basis for your assertion exists. Native Americans like myself have been here over 300 years and built everything around you. The action was already done, the actual building and settlement of this country was done by a specific population, for their ancestors, not the world. Just like every other country on Earth. Time travel and ask them if their struggle is for someone else's children, or their own. What this debate comes down to is a power struggle, who is going to hold power, and given Donald Trump had everything possible thrown at him, constant Nazi name calling, and still elected president says that more native Americans- brown, black, and white, agree with me than with you. The enemy here isn't racial as you think, no one is actually racist. That's left wing propaganda that everyone is done falling for. While you live in moral outrage at "how dare he!", the rest of us are tired of the left, with ideas like you espouse. Giving it all away to everyone else, and selling us down the river for shekels.
Your definition of "the economy" must be how Google shareholders feel. Which doesn't concern me.
Individuals in the USA have been experiencing the pain alone for a few decades now. They've felt a very real crash for quite a while now. For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is the economy. That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country.
Any pain Google feels in the shift to tariffs and jobs for Americans rather than the rest of the world isn't optional. They're welcome to shutdown US operations if it's undoable.
Interesting litmus test and response. I'm not here to convince you. I'm not actually racist. I like Indians and think they're wonderful people. This topic is really about an injustice, not really a focus on population groups.
We recently had an open position that could have been a fit for a new grad with some internship experience or a solid portfolio of projects from just school.
We had just over 20 applicants and selected 6 for interviews using a rubric to score candidates by reviewing CV/resume and cover letter. The rubric doesn't include a specific "years of experience" guideline anywhere. Of our 6 selected candidates, 3 were new grads and 3 were experienced candidates.
At that point in our process, 1 of our 3 new grads ghosted us and never responded to multiple contact attempts to schedule an interview - this may have been our top candidate by initial rubric evaluation. One of our other new grad candidates accepted another job and backed out of our scheduled interview. The third new grad did interview and had an unremarkable interview.
Ultimately, one of the experienced candidates received a job offer. This experienced candidate was one of the top two by initial rubric review along with the new grad who ghosted us. Funnily enough, these two candidates were the only unanimous selections by everyone on the hiring committee to interview, even using a rubric.
There were several parts of the process I found interesting. First, just over 20 applicants is typical for applicant count for an opened position over the last 8-10 years for us. There wasn't a noticeable uptick in applicants despite the general perception of it being a "bad hiring market." Second, we continue to find that many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code. Maybe this is a result of general hiring processes that lean into automatic scanning and processing of CV/resumes and cover letters while my group actually reads these somewhat carefully and usually from a "we hope this person clearly demonstrates we should interview them" perspective. Third, despite my personal misgivings, the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use. Fourth, and this was a change different from past hiring, 4-5 of the applicants were ML/AI-focused candidates with MS degrees (and one PhD). This position is/was clearly just a normal app developer job in an organization that doesn't ship software for sale - we do small-scale app dev and data management for our internal organization users.
These ML/AI-focused candidates were interesting for other reasons. Almost none of them demonstrated any experience on paper besides "wrote a little python to load some ML/AI tool and ran experiments." This isn't bad experience on the face of it, but their CV/resumes and cover letters didn't talk about software dev at all. To a candidate, it was almost all "ran and tweaked model for small gain in performance" for some data set. I'm not sure where these folks will land in the current hiring market?
the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use.
this is what i find most frustrating, and what makes getting a job as a generalist so hard. i have experience with a number of tools and languages, but never the right combination that is asked for. if i don't find hiring managers like you, i don't stand a chance.
many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code
how does one demonstrate that? in my CV i list projects that i contributed to or created, languages and frameworks that i am familiar with, but to me that doesn't demonstrate that i can write code. or does it? are there applicants that don't list these things, or am i missing something?
1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics
2. people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly
3. tech execs hired into the org have relationships with major h1 placement agencies and place from those exclusively, the jobs are advertised with impossible requirements and then quickly sent to h1 pools
4. it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work" -- what was the point of grinding thru 12yrs of intense schooling if you were going to throw the kids under the bus when they graduate?
5. ai is part of it, perhaps for certain jobs, but it isnt AI causing the issues in technology