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Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

They will be happy to replace you with a H1B worker (who himself will be happy to migrate from India to the USA). The current situation is temporary since COVID immigration restrictions remain in place.

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I’ll have a new job. They can do what they want. Hiring fresh H1B employees to replace seasoned engineers rarely ends well. It’s part of the reason we get paid as much as we do.

If I end up leaving because the company refuses to offer WFH, it won’t be getting a 2-week notice or any form of knowledge transfer from me.

I hear the thing these days is to see how long your former employer will pay you before realizing you aren't doing any work for them anymore. It sounds like a joke but I’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions. Coworker just stops showing up and 5 months later their Slack is deactivated.

I’m not denying this happens but if they aren’t missed by their coworkers - who would presumably take the brunt of the work of the missing employee - then they weren’t really contributing. Plus, there’s something terribly wrong with a company that doesn’t notice this. And in Australia at least, the employee would probably end up having to repay their wages.

And wouldn’t their manager be responsible for not noticing?

It's going to be harder to justify a "shortage" of workers when companies cut themselves off from the remote worker pool. I have no doubt they will, but the lie will be much more obvious.

Companies also won't be able to claim they hire the best if the rule out remote, but of course they'll still say it.

That is very job specific if H1B exist with the skills and experience needed

Eh I don’t think so. If it comes to that Americans will just stop letting people come here to work and dismantle these programs. It’s actually something that has been unifying the Sanders/AOC and Trump camps for some time. I don’t know if he has but if not I don’t see Biden really changing much in terms of opening up/increasing H1B visas or any others in the foreseeable future. Maybe more refugees or asylum seekers though.

The current state of affairs is that we have a labor shortage. The country needs more and more service workers. Tech is the go to backup plan for any college graduate (from any major), so the white collar work is perfectly saturated at the moment due to tech (not just developers, pm’s, sales, designers, etc). The only need for h1b are for the truly ruthless cost cutters. Otherwise, you can continuously undercut just here locally with new college graduates or career-changers (bootcamps, etc).

Wages haven't kept pace with productivity since the 70's, and income and wealth inequality has reached astronomical proportions. IMO its time for a bit of inflation and improved employee leverage.

Inflation isn't a good thing. It is probably going to exasperate the wealth inequality and I don't see how it will improve employee leverage. It is an invisible tax caused by government artificially increasing the money supply.

Labor shortage plus inflation is the best thing possible for the people at the bottom of the economy.

Mild inflation can lead to higher employment. We had a super tight labour market before Covid, I remember reading about factory workers getting signing bonuses (!)

Here’s hoping we’ll just pick right up where we left off!

we do not have a labor shortage. We have a wage shortage

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