The most baffling thing is that even now the H1Bs, etc. are still pouring in. How can you say there is a shortage of IT talent and you need to import them where most grads can't find any work?
My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
It doesn't need regulation, it needs taxation. No more billionaires. The endgame is that there's simply not going to be nearly enough jobs. There already aren't, as described in the article, hence why there's all the artificial jobs.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
> Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens.
Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
> Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
Another baseless assumption.
> they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
As a general rule Eng/technical field have to be more transparent, because of the inherent nature of the field. It's another question if they are 'ethical', but I'd say on an average more transparent=more ethical. Exceptions will exist of course.
> CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people
It's no guarantee, I've had a few terrible managers that I assumed were non-technical but was shocked to learn they actually had IT degrees from decades ago.
They just checked out for some reason and would jump from meetings the minute they got even vaguely technical.
"I'll leave that to the engineers as we're self organising, I've got to head off" which left us to run by consensus which slowed everything down.
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.
I work for big tech and we've been hiring US graduates fairly continuously. We're also taking students for internships.
We've also had people poached by other companies.
I would say what's going on is similar to what I've seen in the dot com era. We used to joke during the boom that anyone with a pulse who can type can get a job. Then the economy tanked and it was tough. Throughout this people with reputation and industry connections could always find a job.
Now we're in a period of over-supply of new grads. Companies that over hired for years are making adjustments.
Big companies are generally hiring but try to do so in lower cost geographies where they can. There are still a lot of well funded companies in the US that are hiring locally (mostly around AI). There are still jobs posted here on HN every month. Just possibly less. I haven't been tracking the stats...
Just because the stock market is up doesn't mean there is demand for software developers. I predict demand will come up but these cycles take time to play out. During the dot com bust many ended up leaving the industry because they could not find work.
Because they can't push their finger down a new grads throat if they push back.
Someone who's families very presence in this country depends on their employer will rarely find a reason to complain about being overworked to the bone or told to do questionable things.
H1B and other programs have a noble purpose that is often (but not always) abused to create loyal servants.
The allure for companies of exploiting H1Bs for cheaper and more effective labor I understand. But it is not companies who (at least officially) set the rules and laws regarding immigration.
So the questions is why the government is not turning off the outside supply when there is an internal oversupply.
Immigrants are one thing, but opening the floodgates to 20 million non-citizens by abusing an asylum law meant to grant relief to tens or hundreds was a huge problem.
'Annual reports of immigration statistics for FY1995 through FY2003 published by the former
INS and then DHS contained “Parolee” sections with data on parole grants.88 DHS’s 2003
Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the last to include such data, contained annual data for
FY1998 through FY2003 on several categories of parolees.89 During this six-year period, the
annual total number of persons paroled into the United States ranged from about 235,000 to about
300,000, with port-of-entry parolees accounting for more than half of each annual total.90
Only limited data on DHS’s use of parole since then are publicly available. Among the available
data are statistics covering FY2022 and FY2023 that were published by DHS in response to
congressional mandates.91 The DHS reports for FY202292 and FY202393 included quarterly data
on parole grants by CBP, the DHS component responsible for determining whether or not to grant
parole in the majority of cases. The FY2023 reports also included parole grant data for ICE and USCIS as well as data on parole requests received and approved by ICE and USCIS. As DHS
explained in its FY2023 report for the fourth quarter with respect to ICE and USCIS parole data,
requests, approvals, and grants each represent a “stage in the parole process,” with requests being
“the number of applications and petitions for parole submitted,” approvals being “the number of
parole requests authorized,” and grants being “the number of paroles given.”94
The parole grant data in the FY2022 and FY2023 DHS reports reflect numbers of grants, not
unique individuals. For FY2022, DHS reported 795,561 parole grants by CBP (417,326 by OFO
and 378,235 by USBP).95 For FY2023, DHS reported 1,244,348 parole grants by CBP (940,348
by OFO and 304,000 by USBP) as well as 85,608 parole grants by ICE and 10,046 parole grants
by USCIS.
96 For both years, the quarterly OFO data were reported by what DHS termed “parole
classes of admission.”
97
In addition, from October 2022 to November 2024, DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics
(OHSS) published monthly tables on CHNV parole. It reported a total of 532,110 parole grants
during the October 2022-November 2024 period.98'
At Google they're building parallel teams in India right now.
I feel like 20 years ago the cultural gap between an American an an Indian was too great for offshoring to be successful. Now, what's really different between myself and my counterpart in Mumbai? Many managers here are Indian anyway, lessening the culture gap still.
What relevance does h1b program have to someone trying to get hired in the uk (or remote)? Id wager if op graduated in the us and was willing to work in the office he’d find a decent paying job much sooner with a résumé like his
A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries.
Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
I have more than my fair share of complaints about Trump, but I did like the idea of charging $100,000 per year for every H1B visa. It would have ultimately helped American workers by giving them more negotiating power and higher salaries. So, naturally, Trump was talked out of doing it yearly and it looks like it's legally questionable whether it will stand-up at all. It appears things worked out in a way that benefits wealthy corporations... again.
No, companies were already having trouble getting prospective staff H1Bs. Making them more expensive just increases the incentive to move the job offshore.
Once the offshore team is large enough, companies stop hiring in the USA.
I'm not sure how that act would differentiate between hiring someone in India vs outsourcing to India.
Also, how would it differentiate between outsourcing and SAAS?
A _better_ solution would be to remove the H1-B cap and continue to skim the best graduates worldwide. Same with removing the green card quotas. Make sure if someone gets an H1-B, they can transition to a green card and then to citizenship.
That's always been the US's super power.
Keep the density of innovation in the USA by inviting people in.
A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.
That isn't what happened at all. The SNAP funds have to be appropriated by Congress. Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some groups sued and some judge was asking the Executive Branch to break the law using some emergency fund or funds from WIC or other pots of money that aren't truly earmarked for SNAP. The Judiciary way overstepped there. Then, when a percentage of funds were made available via some mechanism, a few blue states jumped the line and took 100% of them, leaving most states high and dry sans funds. So that looks pretty bad--instead of an even allocation of a percentage, most people get nothing.
SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country.
As far as the $2k checks go, I have no idea. Sigh... Dumb dumb dumb! I just want the national debt paid down and the US Govt. to have a budget and live within its means without deficits. Is that so hard?
I do think Trump sends up trial balloons that exist solely to distract the media.
That isn't what happened at all. The SNAP funds have to be appropriated by Congress. Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some groups sued and some judge was asking the Executive Branch to break the law using some emergency fund or funds from WIC or other pots of money that aren't truly earmarked for SNAP.
The SNAP contingency funds probably are earmarked for SNAP. Whether they can properly be spent on benefits if there isn't a budget appears to be a harder question to answer. I see arguments being made in both directions.
> SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country.
I might have some bad news for you. Come let me drive you around Louisiana.
I find it strange. Any other qualified profession like doctors or lawyers would never let there an army of people from other countries to worsen their job market.
