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Comment by focusgroup0 | Hacker News Reader

>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...

I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.

Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.

Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a statistic.

Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses:

1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.

Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?

That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here...

We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output.

Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.

I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.

and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.

You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.

The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.

Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.

And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens.

So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.

Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they just pass the cost along.

It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.

Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.

Ah, you arrived at the point. Undocumented people don't pay taxes in a W2.

No, they just pay sales tax and other taxes on use. I was being sarcastic because you are fundamentally incorrect and as the other comment said, engaging in sophistry.

Disrespectfully, get fucked.

Oh man, struck a nerve here huh. We escalated from sarcasm to rude quickly.

I enjoy both fucking and getting fucked, I shall take you up on that.

Have a nice day!

> Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they just pass the cost along.

This is sophistry. Ultimately the tax is paid by the person that brings their money to the table.

Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes, ... that they also will never be able to benefit from. Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens

There is a good case for vetted legal immigration (there is need and they fill that unmet need), no question; however, that should not be at the expense of the local population, regardless of country. In other words, the locals should not suffer a depressed job market because of immigration. The whole reason for a state to exist is to first and foremost look after the wellbeing of its citizens that elect the bodies of government.

I'm not sure where you're getting that from in my comment. I never said US citizens should want H1Bs for everyone with zero vetting, only that they are a net tax positive.

It's not a dichotomy of maintaining the status quo or getting rid of H1b completely. At least in big tech companies, they do follow labor market tests and prevailing wage tests and so on that are designed to vet that there is an unmet need and that visa holders aren't underpaid. I won't deny there are visa mills and consultancies that game the system and pretty much explicitly just hire cheap foreign labor, but this is a thread about H1B in the context of Amazon layoffs, not InfoSys layoffs.

It depends if the immigrant is hired because the native worker is deemed too expensive. In this case, it contributes to reducing contributions through wage suppression.

If you have access to data that shows big tech is preferentially hiring visa holders over US citizens you should get on that class action lawsuit right away. That's probably hundreds of thousands or even millions per person in lost wages, and even after lawyers take their 30% cut, that's still a sizable chunk.

It's anecdata, but a college friend who now works at as a manager in an IT/Data consultancy in my birth country in the EU told me bluntly that they prioritized hiring foreigners as they were 20% cheaper.

Given that the company sponsors them and come from lower incomes countries, they are ready to accept lower wages. If they do it I don't see why everyone wouldn't be doing the same.

It's of course hard to prove formally as those companies will comply with regs to make it look like they aren't discriminating (fake job ads, etc...). By the way in the US Indian consultancies got busted for this.

The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.

How do you figure that?

Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.

You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.

> Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.

This is a nonsense comparison unless you include the proportion of income that said taxpayers earn.

Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.

The government would not be able to fund every social program or services if it weren't for these receipts, which, most people cannot afford to pay. Even 100% of the majority of salaries can't cover this amount.

Pretty cut and dry.

> Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.

It matters because we don't know if these people are being taxed more proportionately or less. Like, Elon Musk pays more tax than you or I, but he probably pays at a much lower rate.

What you don't want (from an equity and fairness perspective) is for people with more money to pay a lower rate of tax. That will cause problems.

From a total population perspective, given some amount of money S it doesn't really matter who pays it (except for downstream impacts around fairness and elections).

However, your original point was:

> The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.

I would argue that this is incorrect, everyone pays some proportion of their income in income/sales/property/estate taxes. And really, your point about who pays the majority of US federal taxes doesn't actually support your point.

Finally, I would note that I mostly replied because I really hate those top x% comparisons as they're deceptive without looking at the proportion of income earned.

"Fairness" - it's not about fairness, it's about basic accounting.

Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.

Progressive taxation or 'fairness' doesn't change this reality.

> Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.

Of course they could. Taxation is not necessary in the short term for a government to provide services (especially if we're talking about the US which both issues its own currency and benefits from massive foreign demand for its debt).

Over the long term, taxation needs to at least pay back the debt but that long-term appears to be much longer than I would have expected (when was the last time the US government ran a surplus?).

Which is a very stupid way to look at things since it only means they are able to get the majority of the richest made by the country

Companies want to cut costs. They will.

If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.

Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.

Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.

Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this.

Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea.

We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here.

De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance.

All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects.

America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.

I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital.

That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America.

Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.

> We need to move the cheaper labor here

Very smart & pragmatic.

however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal

If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil.

They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.

> If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here

The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.

>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones.

Like any other country, yes.

>But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.

Compared to India? Or is it fine to lower standards of quality when you are paying an 8th of the cost and it turns out most people don't need to be from MIT to contribute?

That's perfectly fine and dandy. But that's not what H1Bs are for.

H1Bs aren't paid 1/8 their counterparts in the same company.

And no, the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well. We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.

Go to any FAANG in the US and you will see people on H1B from all over Europe, Africa, South America, etc. but Indians and Chinese are the largest group because they are the largest population countries with established pipelines from schools there to schools here to jobs here.

>We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.

So we are talking H1Bs. Does that mean this small pool of "best foreign talent" also all happen to speak English and are able to communicate their ideas on a team?

>the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well.

Well you're already shifting your point:

> But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low.

You're criticizing America as an excuse to find people overseas and bring them in. Thanks for proving the fact that H1B is being abused. So you're telling me your fine taking the time to find the finest H1B workers but not Americans?

How am I shifting my point?

If we have say 1M job openings in a field, and only 250k American citizens can pass a screen for that job, then we need to find other people for it, no? Those people will be likely to most common from the most populous countries in the world...

>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.

I'm convinced that the code screen functions as a somewhat arbitrary filter/badge of honor.

FAANG and equivalents get tens of thousands of applicants and they cannot hire them all

If too many pass the code screen, they will just make it harder, even though the job hasn't gotten any more difficult.

Or they get failed at system design. Which is BS in many cases.

It's a necessary filter. Again, you need to interview candidates for these jobs to understand. Our industry doesn't have any qualifications, any exam to pass to certify, so there are just a ton of people who can't do the basic job but think they are qualified because we don't have a good way to screen people for this work.

>Our industry doesn't have any qualifications, any exam to pass to certify,

By design of FAANG, yes. They put down any attempts to certify SWEs

> If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.

Offshoring is not always a substitute for an employee chained to the job by a visa. I'm sure you can get a million and one anecdotes here on HN about the perils of working across timezones, cultures, and legal systems.

We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.

H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

> H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.

Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products.

Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.

Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation.

If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive.

So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future.

I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.

Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is probably the most efficient individual system from a capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the entire system if everybody does it.

Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems.

So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.

If my job is shipped to India today why would I care that twenty years later the boss is Indian instead of American?

> If my job is shipped to India today

Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy. This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity and demand.

Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be bleaker.

If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which one to pick.

> This might have a suppressive force on wages

And that's the general problem. People don't care about the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less about the overall health of the economy. I care about being able to subsist mine and my family's life style, put food on the table, someday own a home, not live paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying below a living wage, etc.

I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring isn't great either.

We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by not abusing the program and actually only importing for roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not be filled by a domestic worker.

Usually the next step of this failed discourse is to explain that locals are so entitled that they don't want to do hard jobs for the minimum wage, due to decades of wage suppression done thanks to immigration.

In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).

The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"

Innovation is why american salaries in tech are so high. They funded trillion dollar companies.

If that becomes so much of a commodity that some other countries can do it for pennies on the dime, then yes. Salaries will deflate. But we sure aren't offshoring (nor using most H1bs) to see more innovation. Quite the opposite.

Tech isn't manufacturing where the biggest supply line wins by default. That's why I'm not holding my breath that the US isn't going to be outcompeted on talent anytime soon. Of anything, its own greed will consume it.

That seems low. Is it a corporate strategy to set a low salary and when nobody local fills it (because it's below the competitive rate) they get to hire H1-B?

Yes.

That's the commonly used method for more than a decade, yes.

No, because H1B has pay requirements. As someone who went through the process with Amazon I can confirm that they definitely do offer you a salary that is in line with the local market. There might be lower incentive for raises down the line, but that's a conspiracy theory at best

> Salary is $70,000/year

The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k in areas like Seattle.

Allowed by whom?

By law. H1b requires the wages to be greater than the prevailing wage for similar positions in the region. They are published by DoL: https://flag.dol.gov/wage-data/wage-search

For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2 _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage is $212202, btw.

The H1B requirements are even higher, but also WA state law requires software developer salaries to be 3.5 x minimum wage x 52 weeks per year. Currently, that is $124k+, because minimum wage is $17.13 per hour.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=296-128-535

https://www.lni.wa.gov/forms-publications/f700-207-000.pdf

Link the job description because I don't believe this is real.

You say "we should want open borders" then argue for something that is objectively not open borders. "Open borders" and "controlled immigration" are diametrically opposed things, regardless of whatever liberal limits you're imagining. Almost nobody is arguing for zero immigration.

Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).

Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.

> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?

That's my opinion.

However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.

And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.

Guy in San Francisco can move to NJ easier than Mumbai.

I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.

would job hop allowance help?

Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation. Let's not have large companies game around the slots allotted and using various means to get more slots. And put some serious enforcement on how they justify their H1b's to begin with as a start.

Yes, but also salary minimum at top industry percentile to prevent use for wage suppression domestically.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40 H-1B employers)

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)

Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)

H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)

Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)

How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)

Several of the links of yours are about PERM applications, not H1B.

I agree abusers (employers) should be put on he H1B visa blacklist which already exists.

H1B already mandates that employees be paid within the wage window of their peers. And anecdotally I know several who make more than their citizen peers in the same company same level

> want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept...

There are no loopholes on H1B, it's working exactly as it was intended - replace, not just supplement - American workers with cheaper, more obedient tech slave workers dependent of their master-employer for their survival.

The talent visa is called O-1 not H1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=envbbUc4LhU

Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?

There's no reason why it shouldn't, but why should American corporations subsidize it?

Because they can hire 5 programmers in India for the cost of 1 in America, and American programmers aren't 5x better than Indian ones ? Amazon is an online shop, not a jobs program. I'm sure they would rather eliminate a position altogether even more than sending it to India.

Let me rephrase that. Why should American citizens allow American corporations to do that?

Seems just to me, honestly.

GDP matters very little when I’m homeless.

If you're homeless due to losing your job, then you'll be homeless whether your job goes overseas or to someone else in the US.

At least in the latter scenario the job is still here for you to get back one day

Based on the "Worst Case Housing Needs: 2025 Report to Congress" released in late 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that foreign-born population growth accounted for approximately two-thirds of the increase in nationwide rental demand between 2021 and 2024.

Of course. In any growing services-based economy you will have foreign born population growth. If you eliminate that population growth, economic growth will decline with it.

If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much.

I'd also recommend you read this. Many government reports since Trump took over and fired long standing professionals and hired loons are suspect: https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_1...

> 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees

Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q

Many Software Engineers gone. At L6 and L7 level.

Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/

The parent comment is obviously cherry picking news and trying to push an agenda.

Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...

Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai

The US investment link is broken, and most of the UK jobs are in "fullfillment", some of the least fullfilling jobs - piss bottles all round.

And the original link about investment in India is also about fulfillment jobs and even worse, “investing in AI”, aka building data centers, which contribute essentially no jobs at all.

The AI investment is largely earmarked for data centers. Low staff but expensive because the hardware is currently very expensive.

It's not equivalent in the least. They aren't expanding headcount by 20K, they're building more expensive AI tailored servers

[flagged]

Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.

I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.

Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.

To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.

They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.

You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over.

If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.

"Exchanging goods and services for money to a locale" is not a colonial model.

I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.

No but you give up a large margin to shippers, importers, distributors and retailers in those geographic locations.

Which is an entirely different dynamic than what the person I responded to was calling for

If a foreign entity came into Florida and bought up 35% of the entire retail infrastructure, you bet the US government would regulate it and demand local value capture.

Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.

And Chinese/Korean workers being fired while American workers are being hired by their companies would absolutely be correct to see their jobs being offshored

> If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model.

Meta try very very hard to avoid having any data within Indian borders, because of their privacy laws.

This necessitates not hiring product or data people there.

Source: worked there for five years many moons ago.

> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.

That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.

>I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.

Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!

I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.

If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.

>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.

Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.

Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.

>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.

It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.

I'm pretty sure that most American software engineers would take a stable job with a salary without RSUs over RSUs but you can get laid off tomorrow.

and why do i care for the investor's perspective? they already made enough money to last them 100 lifetimes

True. This is Globalism at work. If these companies were not selling goods and services globally then they wouldn't have to deal with setting up offices, staff, pressure from local politicians to hire locals around the world.

Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.

It not pattern matching, it’s literally two things happening at the same time… in a business… that strictly budgets everything…

It’s not a pattern it’s a plan.

Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.

> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.

Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?

It's not really on them to think of an example to disprove themselves? Do you have one in mind?

Ok let's try this another way:

if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country.

Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself.

Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.

And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.

Here was the OP's claim:

> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.

They made a general claim that a big retailer in a country will have a big corporate presence in that country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my response.

They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which is why I asked a few follow up questions.

> You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to provide.

Here’s the claim you made:

because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

That was commentary on the poor format of the arguments that were made by the OP and you. It's not a "claim".

But sure, if you insist, Temu is a large online retailer that operates in the United States without a large corporate presence here. QED.

Places like Temu are the exception and they should be banned. Garbage dumpers.

Sure, they've already done it, Amazon, in India.

Thanks, let me make some other claims and then you can spend time disproving them. Does that sound like a good idea?

As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for the company and not bad for the affected workers.

People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s. Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet, of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped paying attention.

It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.

Outsourcing in the 90's/2000's failed because you didn't want to deskill engineers and reduce their scope, you wanted Jeff Dean building pagerank and building Google.

Outsourcing happens when the economy forces companies to cut costs. When innovations return substantial growth, most companies don't think much about the costs. We have a rough economy, bad tariff policy, a weakening dollar, and immigration policy that's reducing the overall US population (and with it, spend in the economy). All those factors push companies to need to cut costs

Convenient how you absolve Amazon of responsibility. They were forced to do it!

They aren't the only company in their sector laying off. It stands to reason the economy as an outside factor is heavily involved

Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.

There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.

I don't understand this overreaction to this news. Amazon does massive layoffs every fucking year.

2026: 16,000

2025: 14,000

2024: 500

2023: 18,000

2022: 10,000

It was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B

It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.

I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues

Amazon has contributed enough to the current administration that I doubt they will face any consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side of the current administration.

Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...

https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230

Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax.

America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable.

We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.

Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.

This is reductive and wrong. The billionares make money hand over fist either way. They own the companies. They don't care if the new campus or factory is in China or India. They skim their cut off it's productivity either way.

It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.

That's what the third shoe is for - aircraft carriers.

It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however.

The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare.

The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo.

Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that collapse is when the meat suits will toss aside socialized truths of history and go crazy primate.

> It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however

I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded)

Just kidding, I know it has not.

The whole point of it seems to be to dismiss the entire economic system in favor of something that almost nobody has bought in to like bullion or cryptocurrency or somesuch for the benefit of the speaker. Currency, even paper currency, is one of the most pervasive societal "grand illusions" that we share. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing as it greases the entire system of exchange for literally everyone everywhere.

The judges of validity will be the architects of the current system.

Well, history has those uniquely medieval (or early modern) situations where kingdoms adopt fiat currencies just before they fail. I dunno how much academics discuss those.

Well, history has those uniquely medieval (or early modern) situations where kingdoms adopt fiat currencies and don't fail. I dunno how much academics discuss those

Yeah, so funny how they say "fiat" but never say "shiny metals"

Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary.

This is an old, and well tested strategy.

E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out of the US.

You can try putting more constraints on what will get a company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of structures, but as you indirectly point out, there are really only downsides to playing that game.

You don’t have to dig commodore from the grave, there are current-day examples of companies doing the same.

Just to name one (even if it’s not American): Canonical.

It (canonical) is registered in the isle of Man, a fairly known tax haven.

Also pretty much every company with a "headquarters" of some kind in Ireland, notoriously including Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

I didn't have to, but the reason for doing so was to point out that it is an old strategy.

> I didn't have to, but the reason for doing so was to point out that it is an old strategy.

Good point, i had not thought of that!

Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.

No, I think companies that want to stay competitive will leave the US.

Conveniently India and the EU just signed a major trade deal.

It would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).

Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.

Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.

Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.

> employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs.

I think you misunderstand the point of the system.

I don’t, I’m calling it out as toxic and a drain on society

> The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors).

It would surprise you to know that Booz Allen laid off 3k people last month then, huh?

Or Boeing laid off 3200 people in September 2025.

You should look these things up before you pop off like that. Three minutes of research is all it takes.

Sure, and how about executive compensation? The gains aren’t spread throughout the company. You see highly revenue positive businesses like Google and Amazon laying off thousands of employees while record profits are abound.

You missed the point entirely, and if you were to take a few minutes to look this up you’d know that

If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get market access revoked from places like India. They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete, and Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.

Amazon themselves have experienced in the past how heavy-handed Indian regulators can be.

It’s not a zero-sum game anymore. You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.

> You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.

This is the value prop of the US military

It was, at least it worked for Europe, but Trump has seemingly managed to ruin that too.

> They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete

They already do.

How do you punish them? Have ICE raid their offices? There is already a significant tax benefit for hiring developers domestically.

> [p]unish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues

They ain't doing squat.

The Trump admin is encouraging technology transfer to India as part of Pax Silica [0] and GOP politicans in Ag heavy Purple States like Iowa [1] and Montana [2] are trying to mollify India after China pivoted from American to Brazilian soybeans [3] and India began tariffing pulses/lentils [4].

Additonally, Indian ONG majors like Reliance are negotiating with the Trump admin to purchase Venezuelan oil now that Maduro is in custody [5] and India SOEs have starting creating partnerships with ExxonMobil [6], Chevron [7], and Phillips66 [7] to "drill baby drill".

As such, what are you going to do lol - Agriculture and Ag adjacent industries employs 22 million Americans [8] and the Energy sector employs 7 million Americans [9] mostly in Red and Purple states. Software only employs around 2 million Americans [10] in either Blue states or Blue pockets of Red States.

[0] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815

[1] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...

[2] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s...

[4] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-dai...

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-reliance-talk...

[6] - https://www.livemint.com/companies/ongc-exxonmobil-collabora...

[7] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-phillips-66-...

[8] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...

[9] - https://usafacts.org/articles/renewable-energy-jobs-grew-in-...

[10] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Iowa hasn't been purple for a while. Montana maybe a bit more recently.

For the presidential election sure, but I wouldn't underestimate state level organization of the DNC in the rural west and Midwest.

The issue is fractured fundraising basically undermines the local organization by funding challenger candidates, which alienates local Dems and depresses turnout (TDP is notorious for this).

Iowa is going to be a competitive race hence why Joni Ernst decided to not run for reelection.

TDP?

Fire h1b positions, make them leave the US and rehire them back in their home country. They can train their new co-workers.

I'm not serious but I'm sure some people on H1B have had similar happen. From a business POV this would be an ideal situation.

Just Walk Out was actually 1000 people in India. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".

For who does not know, in tech Amazon has always been the biggest H1B shop.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...

Based on what Amazon team you are in more than half are born in India. Makes sense they’d be moving operations there.

I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.

I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.

There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.

Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.

They are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.

FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.

You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.

Others like Google increased by 60+%.

You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).

But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).

>You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US?

>You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.

Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.

Ok, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to work for less.

H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.

There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.

None of what you're saying is related to what the parent post is saying at all. He's saying, if the immigrants are exceptional, they should be on an O-1 visa, which is specifically designed for exceptional people. If they're not exceptional, then why not hire an unemployed American worker instead?

H1B supposedly is designed to address "shortages", but there are no actual shortages.

https://layoffs.fyi/

The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.

The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.

> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

Better for whom?

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.

The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.

Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.

All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.

This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.

The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.

There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".

There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.

There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.

1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.

2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!

3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.

> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates

I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.

They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals. And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that a company goal.

It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.

"foreigners who often graduated in the US"

This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.

> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.

Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.

you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.

How is that related to a transfer? If you have a job on an H1b, you can get another job and switch to it any time with a transfer.

re-read OOP, not your own jump to "transfer"

My logic is if you can transfer you don't have absolute loyalty. Your logic is... what exactly?

It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out

I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.

You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.

Even a 5% chance you and your partner/kids have to uproot their life is a bigger sacrifice than a 30% wage increase, at least to some people.

Great, yes, but you sure as hell don't have "absolute loyalty" to a company.

Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that unless they are ready to go back to their previous country.

> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already.

Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.

> as visa holders are desperate

That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic path to a green card.

Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.

>native Americans I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?

Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed? Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?

However many generations it takes for your skin tone to be white. See also: the President's wife.

Making h1b an automatic track to a green card (partially) removes the ability for employers to exploit employees on an h1b.

Hiring American workers at current market wages avoids this problem entirely.

I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to have a six-fig job just because of my debt.

> I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.

Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.

1. Or a laid-off American tech worker

> there are enough american job seekers in CS

To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals.

Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.

As an American this does not match my experience at all.

What profession were those women looking for?

Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?

Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.

Ha yeah. “You’re a really interesting person and a great fuck, but you don’t make enough money for this to be serious”

the same person, a short while later

“Why doesn’t anyone love me!?”

What is going on in this page haha

They tend to have personality, which I and most women consider more important than looks or money in my experience

I don't think most professional athletes are lauded for their "personality".

The other 3, sure. Bartenders need to be good at talking to people to succeed, and artists need to be more eccentric (in a different way from nerds) for their own success.

Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.

Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.

Has it ever occurred to you that all those fields have one thing in common? it's empathy. The people in those positions tend to not be the kind to murder you when you say no. Not saying that's true for blue collar men, but the odds are significantly higher. Also doctors and lawyers naturally tend to be around doctors and lawyers, that's hardly the crazy observation you seem to think it is

Sure but that doesn't fit the notion of "being a software engineer is a turnoff".

Not sure lawyers or climate scientists have more empathy then a middle age man who lives with his mother and cares for her while getting a disability check. But woman prefer the former.

The answer is woman value status.

Getting murdered is a hollywood / news fear that rarely happens. People should be worried about deadly things that happen often like cancer or heart attacks. Those are rarely the leading story on the nightly news.

Programmers are around programmers but the rate they marry another programmer is much less. Even with a gender imbalance women programmers are not seeking male programmers like women doctors.

I implore you to look at r/whenwomenrefuse

> climate change scientists

They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a mate.

I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.

Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)

Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.

We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.

Maybe the kids are alright after all?

What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff.

No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.

Industries don't, people do. One thing to keep in mind is that corporations have always worked with fascism, they will never resist but workers can. Sabotage takes many forms and one can just look at how Dutch resistance worked against the Nazis.

You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance

I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

>I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

Well yes. That was partially my point. Tech is no different; there's a lot of companies capitulating but I see a huge surge of people speaking out against this. Even people you largely think of as non-partisan previously. I don't think it's fair to pit me into some fascist state because of a company I no longer work for nor perhaps never worked for.

But tech lacks the unions that other industries have and by its nature is a lot more scattered out. I can't do much more than the ones criticizing the companies with regards to providing a "Dutch resistance"; I don't work for them (heck, I don't even have a full time job as of now) and I've done a lot of culling of what I use over the decade. Probably more than what many have done, but still seemingly insignificant in terms of their bottom line.

I'm all for collective action, but I'm still looking for that collection. It seems like things need to get as bad as Minneapolis before that collection emerges.

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?

> But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then.

Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.

Not in most of the cornfield country.

Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"

> Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.

Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.

I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).

It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.

EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.

tell us more about your racial-based hiring

We used to have contractors/employees from a bunch of different countries (India, EU, Eastern Europe, South America, etc). Our (largely Indian) tech management pushed very hard for us to offshore to India exclusively.

We had to let people go who had been great contributors. Some of them were actually CHEAPER than the Indians who replaced them. I tried very hard to keep one of these people and after much politics up and down the management chain ultimately got "yes, he's a proven coder who does great work and costs less than all our recent Indian hires, but you have to let him go anyway because he's not based in India". I've never encountered something like that and it tells me that money wasn't the primary driving factor at all.

I have also observed strong racial preference in american companies just as you describe -- indian, chinese, and korean management building almost exclusively same-race teams or outsourcing work to their home country, etc.

It's really gross but I'd never been in the position to be told explicitly to find a $whatever. That's illegal in the US but appears to be unenforced.

> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

> Indian recruiting firms

There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.

Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth extraction. A bought and paid for political class.

Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.

> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.

I can't speak to all of those, but Doordash has extensively outsourced its software teams to India. I also know that lots of hospital software companies also outsource to India. Your FSA provider probably had someone in a call center transcribe an email incorrectly and we all know most call centers aren't in the US either...

> There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.

You'd need to prove this statement. F500 companies have more money than most companies and pretty much exclusively hire through recruiters. If you were top talent and wanted to work for a top overseas company, it seems like working with a recruitment agency would be a no-brainer.

In any case, I had zero say in who to use. I was handed some contacts and told to make it work.

Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every day of the week. shrug.

I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.

Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.

Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.

"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.

What's an American name? Are you referring to WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) names?

bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11

Very related IMO. Even before Trump US workforce was expensive, now limit the influx of new workforce and hiring abroad looks like a logical decision

Imagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the US government would never do something like that on purpose.

I can't imagine Donald Trump would harm the US on purpose.

He absolutely would harm some people in the US to benefit other people in the US. The same is true for many many other businesspeople and politiciansl

Nothing to do with it, just following a trend before the attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-b...

There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people.

Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is also far behind).

His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant) I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on the path to citizenship.

Do you think those companies would bat an eye about increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important.

Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to India centers suppresses white-collar wages.

Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job?

Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.

Sorry but making around $40k in 2015 would not, under any circumstance, require you to live with 6 roommates in Austin. That is EXTREME hyperbole lol

My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I had my own apartment and car.

Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?

If you read this person's comments, looks like they are just making up crap. Apparently this one person has met or interviewed all the Indian H1Bs in the US.

Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.

I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.

Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.

I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.

The AI of ten years ago is not the AI of now...

But the scam is still the same.

The AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product.

The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.

"do things that don't scale" and what not

This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?

I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.

If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.

That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.

How small can that slice be though?

It’s only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and where the company has to find the skills where they exist. If that’s the US, then sure they’ll continue some small slice of employment here for those projects. But as you said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people severely underestimate the talent present in other countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85% of those teams could be in India.

Amazon's entire business model depends on importing cheap Chinese made goods so this isn't a real surprise.

AWS accounts for more than 50% of Amazon net profit though

AI = actually Indians

Maybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.

> Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.

More AWS outages means more breaks from work?

Sorry, VP says we're migrating. What? Will they see it through? Of course not!

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