Tech job relocation market is recovering. The competition is growing faster
relocateme.substack.com
relocateme.substack.com
Most telling: I mistakenly filtered against all jobs in SF on LinkedIn and I was a few pages in before I noticed. There were just a few lawyer jobs in the mix but literally every other job was AI/backend/product engineering roles. Meanwhile, I know an experienced EM from enterprise SaaS who has all but stopped looking for work.
* A non-zero amount of employers simply aren't opening jobs because they're all-in on AI replacing workers within the next 6 to 18 months, and have been all-in on that gambit for the past two to three years.
* Tariffs are choking out domestic tech workers in non-tech companies, as those companies try to save money by farming out to MSPs and contractors instead of retaining in-house talent.
* Interest rates choke out job growth across the economy as a whole, but the Fed can't really lower them since inflation continues skyrocketing due to tariffs and geopolitical destabilization
* The government axed 10% of the entire bodycount from the 2008 Collapse, in the span of a year, and from within its own ranks, thus increasing competition further
* The remaining folks who want to put butts in seats are being tied by their leadership into offering lower salaries for higher skills/experience, and the hiring managers still want to find a candidate that's willing to take shit pay but also not leave the second things improve
* Continued datacenter buildouts and the Nth-order effects on supply chains continue to support the narrative that AI will just replace all work(ers) anyway, so there's no point trying to deal with this crisis, but aren't displacing enough jobs to spur policymakers into actually fixing the problem through increasing taxes or passing more regulations.
* Ongoing deportations are hampering complimentary jobs for citizens. Research from the Obama era deportations show that for every 100 migrants deported, 12 citizens lose their jobs - meaning under the current regime alone, as many as 72,000 fewer jobs exist solely from deportation efforts since the start of their term.
This is bad, ya'll. There's no "easy" way out of this either, no silver bullet to make everything all better and get folks back into job roles again. If the regime capitulates on tariffs or geopolitics (which they won't), they look weak and incompetent (which they are). If the Fed lowers rates to boost job growth, inflation will take off like a rocket because that's what Capital has been trying to engineer since 2024; if the Fed raises interest rates to keep inflation in check, the job market will crater and the datacenter boom will go bust as safer investments produce good returns again. If employers keep wages low, workers will fuck off to greener pastures the literal second they find something; if they raise wages to match cost of living and promote familial growth, they'll have to hire fewer workers and thus increase competition. Hell, by some estimates it's easier to get into Harvard than land a job right now!
Shit's fucked, and until someone forces accountability and takes the L (namely the regime who started this shitshow in the first place), nothing is going to really improve.
Supposedly CA spent 800k on EACH HOMELESS PERSON over the last 5 years. They could have all gotten a free home in a suburb and developer salary for 2 years instead of fraud capture.
Try telling that to the people who have benefited from said conditions for decades and are enjoying the fruits of their harmful labors. They're the ones running all three branches of government from local to federal level and everywhere in between, and they have no intention of changing anything or sacrificing their own gains until they're dead in the ground.
50% of the population is always on the verge of collapse, that is shameful and pathetic. I absolutely do not care about profits until we can provide universal healthcare, universal childcare, and universal education (all levels, university, community college, vocational training).
Not being able to have freedom from sickness or having the freedom to better oneself is the ultimate sin of modern America.
The fact that you care about maybe say 10,000 capitalists over the hundreds of millions of Americans is beyond pathetic.
Who exactly are you serving with this rhetoric because it's absolutely not your children, nor your family or community. Who benefits from this delusion that money only matters in our lives?
What a joke.
it's the usual elastic job market. yesterday BE was down because clueless employers thought saas and cloud would be good enough. it wasn't
today FE is down because employers think slop react is good enough. it clearly isn't.
and cycles goes on.
And please don't say 'third parties'. The two major parties enjoy overwhelming structural advantages. Third parties are crippled even before they get started, and sabotaged if they show any signs of life. For example, in 2024, the No Label movement, whose sole intent was to provide a reasonable alternative to the major party nominees for President, was targeted and in the end never even got a nominee.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-allies-plot-thwart-th...
A rock that sits on the ground and does nothing would have been a better President than Trump who campaigned on actively harming our economy with tariffs then did exactly what he said he'd do and look where we are now
When the democratic party was the party of workers (the new deal coalition), they had super majorities in both houses of Congress for multiple lifespans (1930s to 1990s for the House of Reps alone) but for the last 50 years the party has slowly become more corporate and corporate politicians campaign a certain way. A certain way that ignores the material needs of people, by ignoring these material needs they're left to campaign on culture issues. Culture issues are very finicky. For example, it's not hard to find people that like solar panels, believe in carbon taxes, want a green new deal, but also believe in abortion and are evangelical. Since both parties no longer cater to workers, they're left to chase after cultural issues.
Not going to write a whole blog post out but hopefully you know where I'm going with this: the only way to truly win back sustainable power is provide real systematic needs for every American. Needs like providing medicare for all, universal childcare, universal college/vocational training, public housing, and a public jobs programs. All these issues poll at well over >60+%, across party lines too; but they all require more taxes against corporations + elites.
Once you build a party for workers, you can do actual sustainable systematic change; but you lose this contract once you betray the workers.
Last time we did this we put a man on the moon, imagine what we could truly do with the public backing you with todays advances?
If you can't convince people to vote for you, you have to change your platform. People don't really care about neoliberalism so repackaging it as abundance just means every election is a coin flip; it also doesn't help that the democratic party leadership is just as unpopular as Trump because party members, myself included, see how weak and useless they are but somehow always have enough muster to provide corporate welfare or engage in imperialism.
Do you remember how divisive the ACA was? Or how the Republicans have been threatening to gut it for over a decade now? They literally do not support ANY of the things that you mentioned.
You can both-sides this all day and night, but it does not reflect reality, where large swaths of unpopulated land get disproportionate representation in Congress.
For example China (not without its flaws) largely skipped over the digital drug phase and went straight into funding socially beneficial things like energy and materials production, AI and robotic enabled manufacturing, and large scale infrastructure build out. So ten years later they have a lot of socially productive things and we have a lot of socially unproductive things.
So this is only measuring people who live outside the US and want to take jobs in the US?
The linked report has data: https://relocateme.substack.com/i/186720111/where-the-jobs-a...
Germany leads by a wide margin with 1,218 jobs, roughly a quarter of all listings. In the July report, Germany had 564 jobs, so the country has more than doubled its share. Berlin alone accounts for 696 positions (up from just over 300 previously). This makes Berlin the single most active city for international tech hiring. Hamburg (195) and Munich (186) follow. This is somewhat unsurprising, since Berlin is often praised as one of the most expat-friendly and English-speaking cities in Germany and Europe.
The report is from February 2, so too early for the TDF searching LibreOffice devs to show up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718764 Spain comes in second:
Spain holds second place with 657 jobs, up from 254 in my 2025 analysis. Barcelona (326), Madrid (97), and Málaga (92) are the main hubs. Spain’s 2023 Startup Law continues to bear fruit, and the cost of living remains lower than in Amsterdam, London, or Paris. With 8,580 active tech companies that generate €14.8 billion in annual economic impact and employ over 108,000 people, Spain has become a serious destination for tech workers who want a European lifestyle without Northern European prices.
We should dismantle the H1B program if we are struggling to find roles for American youth.
It’s a net positive for America.
or do you mean the old motel in the scenic locale you used to go as a kid, that has since been bought up by immigrants, has AI art peeling off the walls now and has gone without basic maintenance for 30 years?
But more generally H1B and immigration in general is America’s edge. If people stop coming expect us to lose leadership position in most markets
I have worked with a lot of H1B in general enterprise and it makes 0 sense to me why the vast majority were ever allowed in under the program. There absolutely have been exceptions to this, but in general it's been awful.
> The average H-1B household contributes $30,050 net annually — 2.6 times the $11,530 contribution of a typical U.S. household. At the state and local level, governments see a net average fiscal gain of $5,040 per H-1B household, with H-1B workers generating positive fiscal balances in 49 states. The fiscal benefits of the H-1B program are not exclusive to high-income states. The low-income state of Mississippi, for example, nets $4,600 per H-1B household — a figure that is higher than those of 21 other states.
https://eig.org/fiscal-impacts-h1bs/
> Despite its relatively constrained scale, the H-1B program has delivered economic returns far exceeding its original scope. Even under severe capacity limitations, estimates suggest the program generates $7.5–$31.8 billion in annual net benefits. Native workers experience wage gains rather than losses, while companies winning H-1B lotteries achieve higher job growth, productivity, and profit margins compared to similar firms denied visas.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/practical-h-1b-reforms-serve-u...
The fact is H1B workers are often more educated and better skilled than US citizens. In tech we care less about things like masters degrees and phds but the fact is H1Bs are more likely to have those and more likely to be appropriately skilled for jobs than US citizens. In general they are also richer than the avg US citizen in their society (that's how they can afford to move here for an advanced degree despite the currency exchange working against them)
I am far beyond sick and tired of the pretense that higher national metrics somehow magically mean better quality of life for the citizenry.
If "America" doesn't deliver for its citizens, it will come to an ignominious end sooner than might be expected.
That is predicated on the assumption that "hurr GDP go up!" is good for America which is questionable at best and I take issue with far more than any specific point of immigration policy.
Democrats slogan for upcoming elections should be "Americans First" with outsourcing being a key part of the platform - "while our opponents are pitching 'America First' that has miserably failed for Americans, we will change that." (they won't but good pitch :-) )
You can't just "dismantle H1B" and expect it not to backfire.
We need to cancel the H-1B visa program. It is not helping Americans.
If more Americans knew how much money was being funneled to non-Americans they would be outraged.
The folks being hurt are, broadly, earning more than the average American. Generating outrage around H-1B, specifically, has always been difficult because it comes across as a champagne problem to the electorate. This is why broader anti-immigration messaging succeeds where targeted proposals have failed.
The average American doesn't get to peek inside these offices and so they don't realize how bad the problem is.
They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positions.
It's a disgrace we're letting this happen to our own country.
Right. They don't care how bad the problem is in an office they will never be offered a job in.
> They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positions
Uh, the right has been railing about Indian and Chinese born tech CEOs for at least twenty years now. It didn't land until the message was broadened. (And even then, it was cheap to discard.)
I don’t begrudge individuals but the system is broken. Refusal to train (times explosion of stacks) is another facet.