[keeda]

It's not even H1Bs, all of Big Tech is shifting jobs in bulk to their offshore development centers. It may not necessarily be overt layoffs and increased hiring there, but simply through un-backfilled attrition in the US while maintaining headcount overseas. As a sibling comment mentions, this is simply because that is even cheaper than hiring a H1B, and probably has fewer strings attached.

The trick is that they increasingly outsource not just individual projects, but entire business or technical domains. This significantly reduces the communication and collaboration overhead, as each project does not need to be babysat. They typically have trusted, effective, high-agency leadership (often senior folks who have relocated back to their home country) that take broad strategic direction and execute on it locally.

Of course, there is still a lot of cross time-zone collaboration due to technical dependencies across geos, but that is limited due to a strong push to make all infrastructure "self-serve" (microservices yay!)

I think the shift started spiking shortly after the pandemic when companies realized fully remote work can work well, even across timezones. I am not sure what data the execs saw, but they all seemed to decide on this strategy at the same time.