Yes, and for software, remote work actually... works. Have a few in-person meetups in a year, but most of the day-to-day is git, Slack, and Zoom (or equivalent).
This is why the offshoring boom happened since COVID - remote-first proved that async works well enough, which made offshoring more enticing.
Now that sponsoring 10 H1B visas is guaranteed to cost $1M, I may as well spend that much to open an office abroad, get 7 figure tax credits per employee, and pay a lower salary.
The difference is, that $100k on top of the 30-40% premium on top of base salary means a $150k employee went from costing $210k to $310k almost overnight.
The math for sponsoring someone on any work visa was already growing tenuous against offshoring, but this rule change sealed the deal by giving FP&A a number it can use to justify that it is much cheaper to offshore.
Median teacher salaries in the US are around $63k/yr. If you were to hire one at that rate on an H1B visa for 6 years, the $100k visa cost would be nearly a quarter of the total cost of their hire. (Assuming, of course, that the declaration that it only needs to be paid once per visa remains true, and that Trump doesn't change it on a whim later on, which are absolutely not safe assumptions.)
> Median teacher salaries in the US are around $63k/yr
Also the average salary for Bay Area teachers in the good school districts in my experience. Educators are severely underpaid in California.
Are h1b distributed evenly by state? Think about it for a minute or just go check the data if you have the high skill needed to do so.
If you want to induce a behaviour in thousands you change the law, wagging your finger at them isn't going to work.
Because the person in Brazil would be able to steal your IP and you'd have no financial, legal, or emotional recourse since they're across an international border. Big tech is continuing to find this out the hard way when countries like China and India somehow clone their products in record time.
By hiring in the same country you reside in, you have access to your legal system to protect you and your business interests. And it can also protect your own ego as well (if you have one).
And for the USA specifically, it is also really about the people here. Tech is a surprisingly human industry, and Americans have the humanity and grit to pull it off.
> pay a lower salary
Nothing is stopping tech from doing this right now to American workers. Remember that those higher paying firms do false positive hiring - they reject way more people than they pull in. If you do the reverse and adjust your operations to account for more workers that "aren't good but aren't bad either", you'd probably perform even better than offshoring.
So higher costs on importing workers might prompt a bit more offshoring, but not much, because if those companies thought those jobs could be done offshore, they'd already be there.
Async development at scale (and especially for revenue generating IP) was still not proven until COVID.
Additonally, the reverse brain drain in much of China, CEE, Israel, and India only kicked off in the late 2010s, and the COVID layoffs and subsequent rehiring made it easier to open an office abroad.
> because if those companies thought those jobs could be done offshore, they'd already be there
Every job that would have gone to someone who requires some kind of work sponsorship can now be justified with a hiring abroad.
I'd recommend reading tfa, and as someone who is on a couple boards, trust me when I am saying that offshoring is now going to go in hyperdrive.