> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is.
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.
The language people use is funny. When companies offshore skilled factory jobs to foreign countries, they call that "offshoring." But when it comes to programmers, they call it "going where the talent is." They act like programmers are in a different class than machinists.
Funny, is not really the term I think of. The common denominator of it has always been manipulative and abusive lying. The parasitic ruling class of psychopaths has always used rather basic and typical abusive patterns like dividing, disparate qualifications, constantly moving targets, refusing success, leading on with promises, evading responsibility and especially consequences, often with yet more abuse and even enlisting others to expand and validate the abuse.
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.
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.
Homie you’ve been around here long enough to know that that is exactly the case
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
The vast vast vast majority of programmers do not have access to capital.
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.
> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
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.
>> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
> 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..."
I'm not the person you replied to but I don't see how your comment relates to his, I mean, did you reply to the wrong comment? Do you understand the difference between "talent" and "cheap labor"?
> 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 worked at Google for years. We simply hired as many people as we could find who could get through the process.
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.
This was the old Google, new Google lays off teams and moves them to India. New grad hiring is all but paused, hiring just enough to Seniors to backfill attrition and trying to slot them in at n-1 or n-2 levels.
I've been told by completely different friends, at unrelated companies spanning countries and different US states that if I was only Indian they're sure HR would have called me back. I applied at each of these companies over the years. There's no shortage of talent in the US, there's an uptick in hiring discrimination.
End of the day, given roughly equivalent talent availability, cheaper is where companies go. Maybe some will call it "cost discrimination" or something just as strange, but the many will know it as "sound business strategy".
That doesn't explain away all the H-1B hires though, who move to places where the pay must be drastically higher than my asking rate. Edit: Turns out if you hire an H-1B you must pay them a higher rate, it cannot be lower just because they're H-1B, so they're definitely making way more than I would have asked for. If cost is the factor, then either HR departments are stupid, or some other shenanigans is going on.
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.
That may have been how Google did it back in the day, but in the modern McKinsey approved enterprise noticing that you can pay someone in the UK, or Croatia, or India a fraction of what you have to pay an American is impossible to miss.
At a given level of skills, the company will favor the cheapest employees. At a given level of salary (e.g. US market), the company will find the best possible candidates (most of them are foreigners, for simple statistical reasons).
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.
At this point it no longer matters. Thanks to Trump, they have no choice. We can discuss nefarious motives all we want, and they may even exist, but they don't really factor in at this point.
I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and funding to Tel Aviv.
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.
> less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.
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.
That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ...
Why are Americans entitled to those jobs? If there are people in other countries happily willing to accept 1/10 of the pay do to the same work, why is it morally wrong deny them those jobs?
I don't think anyone believes they're entitled to them.
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.
I think the logic goes something like...in a democracy, government policies should reflect the will of the people. The majority of the people are against exporting jobs overseas when the economy at home is not doing well, especially when the people that control the hiring are becoming obscenely wealthy at the cost of impoverishing the workers.
Who else first? Doesn't every democratic countries populace broadly attempt to vote in their own interests? Was there ever a pretext that they shouldn't?
There’s a lot you can do to directly help other countries that indirectly helps your own country. Creating a rules based system (vs a “might makes right” system) means the powerful don’t just get to take everyone shit, but it does mean everyone gets an opportunity to prosper.
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 be expected to vote in India's interests? Cheaper shit isn't good enough, not least because that derives from the premise that companies pass savings on to consumers.
Companies don’t pass savings to consumers, competition does.
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.
You're just regurgitating old arguments which were once used to persuade Americans that outsourcing manufacturing to China was in America's best interest. Few Americans still find this persuasive, you can find senile babyboomers who still profess these kind of beliefs, but that's about it.
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 old arguments were right. Americans live materially better lives than anyone else. People are disenchanted because of the things that can’t be outsourced (housing, education, healthcare) have become so expensive.
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.
Things become a great deal more complicated when you consider the US is not the only country on earth, and the vast majority of countries do not have the well-being of their population at heart.
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.
Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.
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.
In narrow terms this is bad for Indian entrepreneurs since it drives up engineering costs for them. It's good for Indian tech employees though since they can demand higher compensation.
In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
- 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.
Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state.
> 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.
We absolutely fucked up there. There definitely needs to be protections for shareholders to reduce the chance of exploitation and fraud, but part of the “free market” as it were is for shareholders to fuck off to other companies if they don’t like how one is run.
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.
Typically? Legislation would handle it, but most western democracies are so captured by Capital that getting this done nationally would take decades of time we simply do not have, and be far too risky.
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."
For the first time I've been hearing "this job is only available for US citizens and permanent residents" in recruiter reachouts, and these are for jobs that don't need anything like a security clearance. It's surprising because a TN status (my current status) is trivially easy to get.
Well yeah. I went to a world-class research university in Latam. The brightest kids were making using of internships to Google, Microsoft and Meta a couple years before graduating and by then they already had a career path laid out for them in the Bay Area.
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.
It's bifurcated. Big Tech used it to increase the labor pool local to their existing development centers. The consultancies used it to drive down unit costs.
We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap.
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.
I love how this is always framed as a "pipeline and talent" problem issue (its not), when it's really a "pipeline and talent at salaries I want to pay" issue.
At least you own it, rather than making up an excuse like "talent shortage" or "pipeline" issue to try to conceal the fact that at the end of the day you're just trying to save a buck.
Every economic decisions has that "at the price I want" caveat at the end of it?
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.
I wish guys like you could just be honest and admit its really just about trying to save on labor costs rather than trying to frame this issue like there's some massive lack of skilled domestic engineering talent here.
You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background.
Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components? Very few dev jobs require critical knowledge, even then that can mostly be learned on the job.
So yeah it seems like these companies that rely on massive corporate welfare + the backing of the US government don't want to pony up and pay their fair share.
Why should the government provide utilities to you or public education or firefighters or a legal system for you? What are you doing to make your end of the societal bargain copasetic?
You come across as greedy, people know you're insanely greedy. Why do you continue to be greedy and not help the community? The community is literally on the cusp of inflicting a massive amount of damage and let's not act like this administration won't start going after H1B workers once it becomes marketed as taking well paying jobs away from Americans who are struggling to pay their bills. You can even play it to garner more Congressional support by telling big tech to start relocating jobs into red/competitive districts or they will start taking revoking their H1B workers visas.
It's a powder keg situation and you want to shovel more gun powder around the keg rather than deescalate.
> It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components?
Because typically that's not what you are hiring, even if effectively that's what you will have the engineer doing often.
I was hired for my problem solving skills. For being able to design an application end-to-end. For being able to extend a messy existing system in ways that are sensible. For being able to analyze issues and come up with ways to address them. For coming up with answers for legacy issues. Those among many other things.
Anyone out of a boot camp can write a Java endpoint using Spring. If you think that's what the company is hiring, you are sorely mistaken.
I say this as someone that was an interviewer in past jobs, including FAANG.
Yes, why would you. As in, the question doesn’t make sense. A new grad will command a much lower salary than 150k today. Bet many would take 50k for a chance to train in this market.
Right. Demand is fairly rigid from companies who need the labor. But they, as for-profit entities, want to maximize shareholder value, so instead of paying market rate for labor when the market rate is high, companies attempt to decrease the market rate by increasing labor supply through a variety of means - lobbying for modern indentured servitude (H1b's), shipping jobs overseas, etc.
This stands in direct contrast to the stated arguments they use to justify such moves, like "there isn't sufficient talent inside the US". There is sufficient talent inside the US, it just comes with a price tag they don't like.
Our best programmer was a surfer kid who started programming at 15 on his own.
Software companies invented whiteboard hiring questions in order to determine which random average person could be trained to be a good developer. It's wild to see how dogmatic you all have become today.
Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor.
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 companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s.
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.
> Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today
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.
Warned? I knew this was going to happen and want to see more of it. I don't believe in government enforced discrimination based on country of origin. If you can't compete with someone overseas that's on you, don't make it my problem and don't go crying to the government to force others to hire you.
I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0.
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.
Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas.
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.
> 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?
> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is.
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.
The language people use is funny. When companies offshore skilled factory jobs to foreign countries, they call that "offshoring." But when it comes to programmers, they call it "going where the talent is." They act like programmers are in a different class than machinists.
The author is a tech writer from india.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to call it offshoring.
Funny, is not really the term I think of. The common denominator of it has always been manipulative and abusive lying. The parasitic ruling class of psychopaths has always used rather basic and typical abusive patterns like dividing, disparate qualifications, constantly moving targets, refusing success, leading on with promises, evading responsibility and especially consequences, often with yet more abuse and even enlisting others to expand and validate the abuse.
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.
In some ways they are.
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.
Homie you’ve been around here long enough to know that that is exactly the case
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
The vast vast vast majority of programmers do not have access to capital.
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.
Temporarily embarrassed billionaires
> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
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.
>> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
> 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..."
Gotcha, looks like I misread what you were saying.
> 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. :)
I'm not the person you replied to but I don't see how your comment relates to his, I mean, did you reply to the wrong comment? Do you understand the difference between "talent" and "cheap labor"?
> 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 worked at Google for years. We simply hired as many people as we could find who could get through the process.
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.
This was the old Google, new Google lays off teams and moves them to India. New grad hiring is all but paused, hiring just enough to Seniors to backfill attrition and trying to slot them in at n-1 or n-2 levels.
I've been told by completely different friends, at unrelated companies spanning countries and different US states that if I was only Indian they're sure HR would have called me back. I applied at each of these companies over the years. There's no shortage of talent in the US, there's an uptick in hiring discrimination.
End of the day, given roughly equivalent talent availability, cheaper is where companies go. Maybe some will call it "cost discrimination" or something just as strange, but the many will know it as "sound business strategy".
That doesn't explain away all the H-1B hires though, who move to places where the pay must be drastically higher than my asking rate. Edit: Turns out if you hire an H-1B you must pay them a higher rate, it cannot be lower just because they're H-1B, so they're definitely making way more than I would have asked for. If cost is the factor, then either HR departments are stupid, or some other shenanigans is going on.
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.
Old Google was run by engineers. New Google is run by finance.
Like Boeing. And look how well that's worked out.
Sounds like Microsoft too.
That may have been how Google did it back in the day, but in the modern McKinsey approved enterprise noticing that you can pay someone in the UK, or Croatia, or India a fraction of what you have to pay an American is impossible to miss.
Yeah, that’s part of why I left.
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.
At a given level of skills, the company will favor the cheapest employees. At a given level of salary (e.g. US market), the company will find the best possible candidates (most of them are foreigners, for simple statistical reasons).
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.
At this point it no longer matters. Thanks to Trump, they have no choice. We can discuss nefarious motives all we want, and they may even exist, but they don't really factor in at this point.
I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and funding to Tel Aviv.
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...
> less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.
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.
That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ...
Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
yeah Israel tends to be strong in cyber security.
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 think this is normal? You want free market to work only till it justifies the 200k salaries but not when it leads to similar increase elsewhere.
Why are Americans entitled to those jobs? If there are people in other countries happily willing to accept 1/10 of the pay do to the same work, why is it morally wrong deny them those jobs?
I don't think anyone believes they're entitled to them.
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.
> stop incentivizing them
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.
And why indeed do scabs not deserve a right to work as well?
I think the logic goes something like...in a democracy, government policies should reflect the will of the people. The majority of the people are against exporting jobs overseas when the economy at home is not doing well, especially when the people that control the hiring are becoming obscenely wealthy at the cost of impoverishing the workers.
So, America First then?
Who else first? Doesn't every democratic countries populace broadly attempt to vote in their own interests? Was there ever a pretext that they shouldn't?
There’s a lot you can do to directly help other countries that indirectly helps your own country. Creating a rules based system (vs a “might makes right” system) means the powerful don’t just get to take everyone shit, but it does mean everyone gets an opportunity to prosper.
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 be expected to vote in India's interests? Cheaper shit isn't good enough, not least because that derives from the premise that companies pass savings on to consumers.
Companies don’t pass savings to consumers, competition does.
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.
You're just regurgitating old arguments which were once used to persuade Americans that outsourcing manufacturing to China was in America's best interest. Few Americans still find this persuasive, you can find senile babyboomers who still profess these kind of beliefs, but that's about it.
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 old arguments were right. Americans live materially better lives than anyone else. People are disenchanted because of the things that can’t be outsourced (housing, education, healthcare) have become so expensive.
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.
Things become a great deal more complicated when you consider the US is not the only country on earth, and the vast majority of countries do not have the well-being of their population at heart.
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.
> Why are Americans entitled to those jobs?
Because we spent all this money on Mac Minis to do the work for us.
I'd be more apt to believe this if the mass layoffs and outsourcing hadn't started long before any "scrutiny" of H1B.
Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.
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.
I would love to see India to grow out it's tech sector to something resembling what's going on in China.
Good for India, as it should, for far too long there was a brain drain from India > US.
India needs more entrepreneurs.
In narrow terms this is bad for Indian entrepreneurs since it drives up engineering costs for them. It's good for Indian tech employees though since they can demand higher compensation.
In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
But not particularly good for the startup ecosystem; it could make it even less attractive to not take a corporate job
I am more interested in 2nd order effects, people get experience working at these larger companies and leave to start their own. Exactly how SV works.
33K workers added in 2025 is a drop in the bucket for India. India graduates way too many engineers vs not as many jobs created.
They were exporting jobs before too.
Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems.
- 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.
Almost sounds like there's a deep flaw in the very core of the system...
Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state.
> 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.
We absolutely fucked up there. There definitely needs to be protections for shareholders to reduce the chance of exploitation and fraud, but part of the “free market” as it were is for shareholders to fuck off to other companies if they don’t like how one is run.
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.
I agree with you. How do we undo those things?
Typically? Legislation would handle it, but most western democracies are so captured by Capital that getting this done nationally would take decades of time we simply do not have, and be far too risky.
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."
This is a complete lie, they have been exporting jobs for a very long time.
Ah the classic “behavior X happened before, so an uptick in behavior X is not worth talking about!”
Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
For the first time I've been hearing "this job is only available for US citizens and permanent residents" in recruiter reachouts, and these are for jobs that don't need anything like a security clearance. It's surprising because a TN status (my current status) is trivially easy to get.
The talent being desperate and willing to work for low wages.
People need to eat.
Well yeah. I went to a world-class research university in Latam. The brightest kids were making using of internships to Google, Microsoft and Meta a couple years before graduating and by then they already had a career path laid out for them in the Bay Area.
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.
It's bifurcated. Big Tech used it to increase the labor pool local to their existing development centers. The consultancies used it to drive down unit costs.
The rest of the world is moving on.
We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap.
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...
I love how this is always framed as a "pipeline and talent" problem issue (its not), when it's really a "pipeline and talent at salaries I want to pay" issue.
I like paying as little as possible for everything I buy as well and so does everyone else reading this. So what's the problem?
At least you own it, rather than making up an excuse like "talent shortage" or "pipeline" issue to try to conceal the fact that at the end of the day you're just trying to save a buck.
Every economic decisions has that "at the price I want" caveat at the end of it?
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.
Houses are different. There is a finite number of them at any time and if there are not enough for everyone, there's a shortage.
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.
I'm not paying a bootcamp grad or a new CS grad who never formally studied algorithms or OS design a $150k base no matter what.
CompSci fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason.
Yeah, we know.
I wish guys like you could just be honest and admit its really just about trying to save on labor costs rather than trying to frame this issue like there's some massive lack of skilled domestic engineering talent here.
It is talent though.
You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background.
Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components? Very few dev jobs require critical knowledge, even then that can mostly be learned on the job.
So yeah it seems like these companies that rely on massive corporate welfare + the backing of the US government don't want to pony up and pay their fair share.
Why should the government provide utilities to you or public education or firefighters or a legal system for you? What are you doing to make your end of the societal bargain copasetic?
You come across as greedy, people know you're insanely greedy. Why do you continue to be greedy and not help the community? The community is literally on the cusp of inflicting a massive amount of damage and let's not act like this administration won't start going after H1B workers once it becomes marketed as taking well paying jobs away from Americans who are struggling to pay their bills. You can even play it to garner more Congressional support by telling big tech to start relocating jobs into red/competitive districts or they will start taking revoking their H1B workers visas.
It's a powder keg situation and you want to shovel more gun powder around the keg rather than deescalate.
> It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components?
Because typically that's not what you are hiring, even if effectively that's what you will have the engineer doing often.
I was hired for my problem solving skills. For being able to design an application end-to-end. For being able to extend a messy existing system in ways that are sensible. For being able to analyze issues and come up with ways to address them. For coming up with answers for legacy issues. Those among many other things.
Anyone out of a boot camp can write a Java endpoint using Spring. If you think that's what the company is hiring, you are sorely mistaken.
I say this as someone that was an interviewer in past jobs, including FAANG.
There are plenty of domestic candidates that have those skills and backgrounds.
You would just rather find offshore candidates and pay them less, rather than paying domestic salaries.
Which, ok, fair enough, but at least own it instead of fabricating some "pipeline shortage" to justify trying to save a buck on labor costs.
Yes, why would you. As in, the question doesn’t make sense. A new grad will command a much lower salary than 150k today. Bet many would take 50k for a chance to train in this market.
I have a master's degree and make more than that but still can't write a performant Linux runtime agent, will you pay and train me?
I think a better question is why is a person like you in a position to be paying anyone anything close to $150k?
Every time I read stuff like this on HN I think to myself "Man the downfall of SV can't come soon enough."
There are plenty of non-juniors who meet all of your expectations, you just want to pay them less than market rate for their expertise.
Market rate is a function of supply and demand. Unless the market is regulated.
Right. Demand is fairly rigid from companies who need the labor. But they, as for-profit entities, want to maximize shareholder value, so instead of paying market rate for labor when the market rate is high, companies attempt to decrease the market rate by increasing labor supply through a variety of means - lobbying for modern indentured servitude (H1b's), shipping jobs overseas, etc.
This stands in direct contrast to the stated arguments they use to justify such moves, like "there isn't sufficient talent inside the US". There is sufficient talent inside the US, it just comes with a price tag they don't like.
Our best programmer was a surfer kid who started programming at 15 on his own.
Software companies invented whiteboard hiring questions in order to determine which random average person could be trained to be a good developer. It's wild to see how dogmatic you all have become today.
Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor.
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 companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s.
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.
> Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today
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.
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awifactors.html
> There is talent in the US, all it takes is training
Training is expensive and can fail.
That's why experience has value.
It’s less this but more that talent diversity is present elsewhere. You need constant supply of talent and a good ecosystem that sustains it.
Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.
Talent diversity willing to work for lower salaries is present elsewhere. That's really what it comes down to.
Yeah so? Willing to work for lower salaries is tied to the dynamic of having more supply of labour.
What alternative do you propose?
oh well.... I'm totally fine with this.
Certainly for the people working there, right?
Warned? I knew this was going to happen and want to see more of it. I don't believe in government enforced discrimination based on country of origin. If you can't compete with someone overseas that's on you, don't make it my problem and don't go crying to the government to force others to hire you.
I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0.
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-...
Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas.
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.
> silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas.
Good god, we may just be able to save America!
> 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?
Time to crack down on these cheats.
Good thing the new driving force of the new way to do software engineering wasn't built on stealing all of the work of everyone