I know someone at a growing division of a FAANG who has not been allowed to hire anyone outside of India for a number of years now. They're critically understaffed but the screws only tighten with each year.
This is just the corporate way now in most listed western companies.
If the cost is 1/5th you can accept a lot of trade offs. Even if you need to throw 2x as many people at the problem it still comes out ahead. At least on MBA spreadsheets
As a stockholder that’s how I see them anyway.
I haven’t paid much attention.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-ta...
I can’t see how a US company doing dev outside the US would make any sense anymore, unless they’re big enough to structure everything away.
The tax incentives are insane depending on size.
Getting $20-40k in tax credits per employee, 100% tax deductions on R&D, and around 20-50% of total investment cost getting subsidized when building a GCC is the norm in Czechia, Poland, India, and Costa Rica, along with various additonal local or state credits.
A number of mid-level leaders (Staff, Principal, EMs, PMs) at tech companies are also on work visas with little to no chance of converting to a GC, so employers will let them open a GCC in their home country.
This is increasingly the norm - for example, entire product lines in GCP are owned by their Warsaw and Bangalore office (especially K8s side).
Otherwise the BBB just shot all that in the head.
Pre-BBB, the tax rules favored that kind of outsourcing.
But it is those sized organizations that tend to represent the majority of hiring.
A company with 100 or fewer employees tends to be much more hard pressed with hiring, as revenue for these sized orgs also tends to be lower.
The Section 174 changes didn't have much of an impact one way or the other for larger companies and organizations.
The expectation for output has largely been set now, and even with the current changes I don't see much of an impact on hiring trends.
This also doesn't include the impact that AI productivity tools like Cursor is starting to have on AoPs. It's already the halfway point and I myself am starting to see increased proposals from Engineering leadership to leverage Cursor style tooling wherever possible. And a number of the seed and Series A companies I've funded over the past 2-3 years have largely kept headcount below 100 and heavily utilizing automation where possible, and are on track to hit Series B style FCF metrics with a much leaner workflow.
That said, larger orgs can weather it better - but it’s a fundamental change.
Interesting phrasing, but how do you actually make it work? What does it look like on paper? Taxing ""imports"" of services is really, really tricky.