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 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.
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.
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.
I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.
Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...
Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai
It's not equivalent in the least. They aren't expanding headcount by 20K, they're building more expensive AI tailored servers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.
Disrespectfully, get fucked.
I enjoy both fucking and getting fucked, I shall take you up on that.
Have a nice day!
This is sophistry. Ultimately the tax is paid by the person that brings their money to the table.
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.
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.
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.
This is a nonsense comparison unless you include the proportion of income that said taxpayers earn.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
Very smart & pragmatic.
however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
By design of FAANG, yes. They put down any attempts to certify SWEs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k in areas like Seattle.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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
At least in the latter scenario the job is still here for you to get back one day
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...
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
Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/
It’s not a pattern it’s a plan.