Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to call it offshoring.
For a bit of time I worked offshore for a company in the US. That was pure cost cutting, I was making probably around 5x-10x less than someone with similar skills in the US.
After a while I landed a job that required me to migrate to a different country. I actually make more here than the average salary for a local engineer.
I don't know many machinists that are hired from halfway across the globe, relocation costs included, to make more than the average machinist in the destination country.
Specialized skill is valued in the correct context, when there is demand for it.
Just alone "going where the talent is" itself is just plain out abusive and narcissistic behavior typical of the worst people, it's clearly not the parasitic ruling class or their parasitic abusiveness ... it's you, that you are not "talented", you are not "worthy" now that they have sucked and drained all they can get from you for decades and generations with all the other euphemistic language like "offshoring" instead of "wanting to profit at your expense but externalize the costs onto you too".
So you did this to yourself ... don't you know... because you are simply not talented enough and now you made the parasites have to go seek the talent elsewhere ... see what you did to the parasites who only just want to do right by you?
Humanity really needs to gain a far greater understanding of what narcissism is, how to identify it, how to resist and stand against it, how to counter it, and even how to utterly destroy and eradicate it and anyone who does it from society.
Many people simply don't even really understand what it is let alone how pernicious and subtle it is in its subversion; but it is utterly destructive, subversive, and parasitic for all of humanity. If we self-eradicate human life on this planet it will 100% be due to our inability to control narcissists like the people who say things like "going where the talent is". Just alone saying that kind of thing is utterly abusive and should be considered treason, because it is... betrayal.
Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital
It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction
People wonder why software developers are anti-union it’s because they are fundamentally capitalist at heart
But they eat up the propaganda about how they totally could just happen to get that capital and run a one man software business and make a billion dollars.
Which is why they spent all that time and energy insisting they didn't have to unionize, because they were super important and could totally negotiate better than anyone else, especially a giant group of programmers, and now are panicking because dumb middle managers want to replace them with LLMs entirely.
Very predictable.
If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.
At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
I've also been told for a company I will not name that had I been asian they would have called me, I just assume there's an overwhelming number of asian employees, not that there's anything wrong with that, but if they're discriminating against everyone else from being hired, that's not ethical or legal in the US.
But, I often see this presented as all or nearly all that is going on. There are lots of non-immigrant visa holders who get hired who are better qualified then 90+% of others, and are getting the same pay and conditions and their American teammates. These people are improving the employment prospects for Americans, not hurting them.
In the old days that approach would have obviously worked poorly (it was tried, and it went poorly).
IMO, as the company grew various issues inevitably reduced Eng effectiveness to the point where now outsourcing is no worse.
Now even if you could hire the best from around the world and get them all to MTV, it would not really matter.
I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."
Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
> I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
You'll notice I was responding to something I quoted. They claim they're taking action X because of Y, when they're actually taking action X because of Z. Changing Y will do nothing about X. Hence the tone.
Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
> Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
Fair enough, but I at least have a whole degree in it. :)
> Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
You provided zero evidence for any of these sins in the comment you replied to. I'm kind of shocked how economists get shocked out of thin air, it seems they make everything out of thin but highly compressed air.
> There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc.
There's a reason why people avoid these - in their present form, they provide zero practical value and even worse, teaching them amounts mainly to shamanistic incantations designed to confuse and hide the truth -e.g. BS about "talent" when the issue is "cheap labor".
I was pointing out that capital seeking lower wages is a standard economic outcome and my surprise was directed at how often folks in the tech industry seem caught off guard by basic profit-maximizing behavior. That's just what companies do and they are expected to do so.
Regarding the value of studying economics: it provides the exact framework needed to see past corporate PR. When companies claim they are offshoring for "talent," basic economics gives you the analytical tools to quickly recognize that the real motivation is reducing labor costs.
Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup
you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market
I’m going to wager at least one reason for this is Israel is big in industries that demand that sort of knowledge where in the US, most money was made by CRUD monkeys putting together high level line of business applications.
Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.
If they have less flexibility to hire in the US, they will hire elsewhere if they can. They still have an incentive to hire in the US as it's easier to collaborate when everybody is close by, but apparently it's not enough to favor (less skilled and/or more expensive) US citizens.
What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
That's not true. A US company should be loyal to the US: the fact that they are not is political dysfunction.
China, for all its faults, gets that, and it makes sure its companies are loyal to China. They're also in the process of burying the US economically and technologically. The US is falling behind in industry after industry, and its not creating new, sustainable technological edges at a sufficient rate. That's partially because the shareholder-mercenary American companies repeatedly make deals with the much more strategic China, that weaken themselves and America in the medium to long term.
> What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
It was always unacceptable. It's just that too-many idiot software engineers confused themselves for capitalist barons, because they had a 401k and a higher-than-average salary.
However, in my opinion, if these companies want to continue to enjoy preferable tax treatment and the deregulated environment the US provides them, then they should be expected to hire people in the US to drive the US economy.
If they're not going to do that, then we (meaning the Government both state and federal) should stop incentivizing them. Why would we give government contracts to a company that's offshoring jobs? Why would we give them tax breaks? Why would we leave their markets largely unregulated?
The US Government should incentivize and support companies that are providing value residents of the US. As these companies move to offshoring (and other similar policies), they become economically extractive and the government should no longer support and enable such behavior.
And at that point they simply... shift the bulk of their operations somewhere that still gives incentives, and maybe just leave a lightly-staffed satellite office in the US.
Of course, in reality, they never actually leave because the vast majority of their profits is from the American economy.
Allowing US companies to find talent abroad means those companies can deliver better products and makes competition more viable (ie lowers prices for consumers). If we only care about “jobs” and the size of paychecks, then protectionism is the way to go. But if we actually want to provide broad based prosperity (especially for our own citizenry), then you should not protect a small subset of high paid workers.
Why should American voters pay more for everything so that SWEs can be paid exorbitantly?
I shouldn’t need to explain to you why protectionism is bad. There’s 200 years of economic research on this and it shows that protectionism always backfires.
Besides, in trying to formulate an explaination for how offshoring is actually in America's interests, aren't you tacitly acknowledging that it is only right and reasonable to expect American voters to vote for what they perceive to be American interests?
The America First doctrine, in practice, has meant using power to do things that nominally appear in our interest, but don’t account for the second and third order effects. ie bully allied nations into accepting high tariffs without reciprocating, which doesn’t account for our own industries being hurt by higher input prices, a new reluctance to enter the US market, less competition, etc.
Protecting US workers from competition nominally helps those select workers, but it also makes them uncompetitive, steers businesses from setting up shop here at all, makes things more expensive for US consumers, and reduces innovation and upskilling.
The extreme cases are well known. But let's just give the statistic: the average global wage is $24000 in PPP, according to the UN. In other words, such a global system will be on average a 75% pay cut for US workers.
By the way, that's a PPP paycut, in other words a paycut without anything getting 1 cent cheaper. Not your housing. Not your food. Not your playstation. Not your cost of living. We'll be back to deciding which day in the month we'll have a little bit of meat.
The scary thing if you've ever been there is that India actually cares more than most countries for it's people.
And the truly terrifying thing is that income is distributed along a power law. In other words, it'd be a 50% pay cut for Donald Trump and a 90% pay cut for you and me.
- Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason)
- Outsource, offshore, automate, etc
- Margins and revenue go up
- Two to Three Years go by
- Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor
- Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored
- Executives parachute out successfully
- New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive
- Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country
- Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit
- Leader parachutes out successfully
- New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time
The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections).
None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way.
Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.
> In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay out significant accumulated dividends, limiting Henry Ford's ability to prioritize employee wages and consumer prices over shareholder returns.
The “shareholder value” mandate is one of the greatest perversions of the “free market” out there, miles above any discourse about minimum wages or worker protection laws. Undo that decision along with the Reagan-era ruling permitting share buybacks, and you’d substantially weaken the Boardroom and C-Suite while turning off the two single biggest incentives to the current system of exploitation.
Another court opinion reversing those decisions in some part is an alternative, but equally unlikely given current politicization of SCOTUS.
International treaties could work, if we still didn't have the military and economic might to twist arms in our favor - though with the EU very firmly refuting America's trade policies and expansionist regime, these might be closer than we think.
International finance could also apply pressure for a reversal through pulling investment or only funding firms focused on fundamentals and long-term strategy over quarterly results and share prices alone. Unfortunately we still hold most of the Capital, so that's going to take time to create change.
Then there's the thing. The thing could do it, but it would destabilize global geopolitics in the process by removing the sole remaining stabilizing superpower from the board for the thing. It's always an option, but also one of absolute last resort as a way of resolving the otherwise unresolvable. I am personally strongly opposed to the thing, but man I don't see many ways of avoiding it this far into the current mess.
The more likely immediate course of action is continued protests, riots, and rising violence - just short of becoming the thing, but still bad enough to send a signal to the world that our way of doing things was unsustainable and that everyone else needs to reign things in immediately or risk following suit. China seems to acutely understand this, hence why they take great pains to incarcerate and reign-in Capital lest toxic western economic practices take root within their party or economy; France is in the midst of a similar such moment, and we don't know where they'll end up.
Unfortunately I don't have a clear-cut answer other than "apply pressure to those in power such that compliance with the demands of their people is more palatable than taking funds from Capital or acting in their self-interest."
I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
India needs more entrepreneurs.
In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.
And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...
[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
There's no housing shortage, just a shortage of house at the right place and price. Different places have the right price, the right places don't have the right prices.
There's no job shortage, just a shortage of jobs that pay what I want and am qualified for.
Shortages happen in controlled economies, capitalism just adjusts prices.
If wages are too high, then some work just doesn't get done, some business plans are now unviable.
But everybody needs a place to live.
There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s.
Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock price growing. Then once the investors can sell the stock, they bail leaving the company to figure out how to survive by itself.
Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring.
It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in the US is so superior to make up for it.
As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.
That may be so at the FAANGs and the companies trying to become FAANG-like, but I'm not sure that's the case for people working at more ordinary places.
3 decades ago I worked at a place making retail software for Windows and Mac. I had ~15 years experience. The net tells me that today median total compensation for that kind of job at that experience level would be around $150k/year.
I made $63k that year. My recollection is that this was a pretty normal amount at the time.
If we adjust using CPI that would be $132k now, which suggests my salary then was about 12% lower than an equivalent salary today. However, if we adjust using the indexing factors [1], which are usually consider better than using CPI for comparing wages across time, my $63k then is equivalent to $169k now.
Training is expensive and can fail.
That's why experience has value.
Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.
What alternative do you propose?
So if we're forming normative opinions based on morality (reducing suffering or whatnot), why would I support that? And if we're not not appealing to morality, then what are you appealing to, and why would I want to go along with it?
The only argument I see is a nativist and protectionist one, which uses the superficial facade of morality as a misdirection.
My intention is not to punch down on anyone. I support some level of taxation and wealth redistribution. I support anti-slavery legislation.
Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent.
This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here.
It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
The US is one country, "Europe" is what, 44 countries? You posit that 44 countries "did the same thing a century ago." How surprising can it possibly be that a 45th country might join that prestigious list... maybe?
Good god, we may just be able to save America!
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
[laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20...
[pushed offshore]:
- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...
- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...
[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...
[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...
[collapsed]:
- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...
- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...
- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...
[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...