- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.
[1]: https://www.goodreturns.in/news/tech-layoffs-2025-oracle-cut...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...
[3]: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2, https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2
HN does know. Some of us question whether brave and courageous leadership knows.
Actually H-1Bs are more expensive than Americans due to visa costs and attorney costs, so Oracle can SAVE money by hiring Americans, yet they still decide to continue hiring H1Bs along with Americans.
Then why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?
Software is undergoing a secular downsizing. It increasingly looks like we have too many SWEs, and that we need to support them retraining. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a labor shortage in other industries.
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)
(Im in the same boat, but much longer than 6 months)
With the gig economy as long as you can make 50$ a day via Uber Eats , you might be considered “employed”.
For the days I need to be in the office, my commute is well over 2 hours each way. Pay cuts, horrible commutes.
> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.
There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.
The number from 2025 is not really relevant when the layoffs were in March 2026. The article author clearly has a narrative they want to push.
And of the 436 petitions in 2026, only 235 are new hires (remaining are continuing approvals). Hardly a scandal there. Especially if they're likely hiring AI engineers and laying off call center employees - its not like their laying off an american citizen to hire a cheap H1B employee as this article is angling to have the reader believe.
They are in no-way laying off call center employees, they are laying off tens of thousands of the most highly paid US workers.
And yes the numbers of H1Bs granted in 2025 is relevant. You don't layoff 20% of your 100,000+ people workforce all of a sudden 'cos March went badly.
You don’t know that the layoffs are happening tomorrow. That’s how layoffs work. Except for a few in the loop everyone else is largely in the dark. Hiring doesn’t stop, whether it’s us citizens or it’s H1Bs. 2025 hiring, whether H1B or not, is immaterial here.
Here’s an example of this: Coinbase reneged offers at the last minute. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Coinbase-rescinds-acc...
I can share plenty more if you’d like.
"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."
Here is U6 which is a better reflection imo:
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
And if they don't want to work, why would that impinge upon full employment, because what is the plan? Force people to work who are retired, or don't want to? Work or go to jail? "Full employment" is always presumed to be "people wanting to work can find it".
If the best data you have is conjoined, then you must either figure it out, or ignore it.
Do you know what percentage, exactly, are retired vs "giving uo"?
No?
Then when someone says full employment, they're right unless you have specific and precise data to counter that.
We could also discuss people too sick to work. Or on maternity leave. Or wealth vs desire to work. Or 100 other factors.
That's odd. The burden of proof is not exclusively on one side.
Then yes, you have to start the dance. And work at it. And convince the entire planet to change.
And what percentage of those workers are Walmart or Amazon warehouse employees who don't have healthcare coverage and don't make enough money to actually cover their monthly bills without being on welfare/public assistance?
Because my linkedin extended network says there's an awful lot of highly skilled people unable to find jobs in their respective fields.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5660752/why-americans-d...
That can’t be further from the truth
What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.
20-24 age employment has been about the same for last 16 years:
Male 20-24 employment rate is down 14 percentage points since 1960: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_labor_force_participation_...
> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.
And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.
> America is at near full employment [2].
Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.
> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.
Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.
And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...
And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.
But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.
Real wages are 15% higher than they were in 1979 [1].
On top of that even if we take your link at face value that's a 0.35% growth per year. The medieval warm period had faster wage growth.
Hourly earnings (nominal) have grown at 3.2% per year between 2006 and 2025 [1]. Inflation in that interval was 2.7% [2].
> Americans are working longer than they did in 1970
Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=200601...
>Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/october/how-h...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/america-has-becom...
(Not my favorite think tank but they have a nice chart.)
Which price index are you looking at that doesn’t include housing?
Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/concepts.htm#the-cpi-as-a-c...
Of course, CPI doesn’t capture whether people have roommates or have made other adjustments to keep their housing costs within income limits.
Hope you're not saying this at social gatherings.
What the newspapers(economists | politicians) say, is not reality for most people.
https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2037376353461567734
Apparently, no citizen wants to do this job? Why do we allow things like this?
Stanford wouldn't blatantly violate laws like this.
Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.
So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.