[hn_throwaway_99]

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs, etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these roles were always somewhat "optional").

I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is way more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn't get really good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home) until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same city or a different continent, as long as there is at least some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).

[catigula]

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions.

Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.

[ajmurmann]

I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier for H1B workers to change employers.

[Spooky23]

In context of tech, H1B is great for the money people in the US and India. It suppresses wages in both countries and is a powerful plum for employee “loyalty”. There’s a whole industry of companies stoking the pipeline of cheap labor and corrupting the hiring process.

In big dollar markets, the program is used more for special skills. But when a big bank or government contractor needs marginally skilled people onshore, they open an office in Nowhere, Arizona, and have a hard time finding J2EE developers. So some company from New Jersey will appear and provide a steady stream of workers making $25/hr.

The calculus is that more H1=less offshore.

The smart move would be to just let skilled workers from India, China, etc with a visa that doesn’t tie them to an employer. That would end the abusive labor practices and probably reduce the number of lower end workers or the incentive to deny entry level employment to US nationals.

[senderista]

H1-B also makes CS masters programs a cash cow for US schools.

[rightbyte]

How does H1B suppress wages in India?

[Aeolun]

All those people skilled enough to get hired in the US (for massive increase in wages) don’t try to get similar positions in India, thus, nobody has to compete to pay for them.

[bernawil]

I don't think so. You can argue emmigration takes away supply in the labor side. Why would prices go down? Quite the contrary. I don't think it necessarily raises salaries in India though, because that market seems to have a hard cap somewhere around 36k/year but it sure does opens up positions for newcomers.

[antithesizer]

Because it surpresses wages in the US, so Indian employers do not need to offer as much compensation to keep local workers who are considering emigrating.

[catigula]

I want to use you as a bit of a sounding board, so don't take this as negative feedback.

The problem is that the left, which was historically pro-labor, abdicated this position for racial reasons, and the right was always about maximizing the economic zone.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I saw a report recently about the political left in Denmark, who are basically one of the the only progressive movements in countries that understood what it takes to maintain support, and hence Denmark has had much less of a rise in support for far right parties than other countries in the world. Here's an article, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-immigrat....

Basically, progressives in Denmark have argued for very strict immigration rules, the essential argument being that Denmark has an expensive social welfare state, and to get the populace to support the high taxes needed to pay for this, you can't just let anyone in who shows up on your doorstep.

The American left could learn a ton of lessons from this. I may loath Greg Abbott for lots of reasons, but I largely support what he did bussing migrants to NYC and other liberal cities. Many people in these cities wanted to bask in the feelings of moral superiority by being "sanctuary cities", but public sentiment changed drastically when they actually had to start bearing a large portion of the cost of a flood of migrants.

[ajmurmann]

Is there a reason social benefits must be available to immigrants? It seems like those could result be tied to citizenship or something like a minimum amount of lifetime taxes someone most have paid.

[c0redump]

I mostly agree with you, but i think there’s something you got wrong. The democrat establishment didn’t abdicate their pro-labor position for reasons of racial equity- this was only ever a cover story.

The real reason is that they are totally beholden to powerful business interests that benefit from mass immigration, and the ensuing suppression of American labor movements. The racial equity bit is just the line that they feed to their voters.

[ajmurmann]

I think the problems are more complex and much harder to fix and more depressing. The actual policies by the Democratic party have been "pro-worker". Biden was strongly pro-union. I am hard pressed to think of any policy by the Biden administration that was focused on racial issues. However, it seems like the perception of the Democratic party is largely mixed in with leftists who don't even like the party.

I think the real problem is that the median voter is either unable to, has no time to or no interest to understand basic economics and second-order consequences. We see this on both sides of the aisle. Policies like caps on credit card interest rates, rent control or no tax on tips are very, very popular while also being obviously bad after thinking about it for just 1 minute.

This is compounded by there being relatively little discussion of policies like that. They get reported on but not discussed and analyzed. This takes us back to your point about the perception of the Democratic party. The media (probably because the median voter prefers it) will instead discuss issues that are more emotionally relatable, like the border being "overwhelmed", trans athletes, etc. which makes it less likely to get people to think about economic policy.

This causes a preference for simple policies that seem to aim straight for the goal. Rent too high? Prohibit higher rent! Credit card fees too high? Prohibit high fees! Immigrants lower wages? Have fewer immigrant!

Telling the median voter that H1-B visa holders are lowering wages due to the high friction of changing sponsors and that the solution is to loosen the visa restrictions is gonna go over well with much of the electorate. Even only the portion of initial problem statement will likely reach most voters in the form of "H1-B visas lower wages". Someone who will simply take that simplified issue and run with cutting down further on immigration will be much more likely to succeed with how public opinion is currently formed.

All this stuff is why I love learning about policy and absolutely loath politics.

[DenisM]

I’ve read some analysis than many swing voters supported Trump because they were unhappy with the economic situation, not due to culture wars. In their minds, and words, Trump may change at least something while democrats will certainly change nothing. Whatever pro-labor policies Biden had they didn’t move the needle.

What do you think of that?

[ajmurmann]

I think that all statistics show us that the economy was very strong, especially compared to other countries. We did the impossible and had a soft landing. However, we also learned that the public prefers unemployment over inflation, even if real wages go up. People see their wage increases as earned even if it's just a market adjustment.

Further, I'm very disappointed that the median voter doesn't seem to understand or care about the policies they vote for. Tariffs and deportations are recipes to cause more inflation, yet here we are.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Employment-based immigration policy just isn't controversial outside of very specific bubbles. Everyone who's considered the problem seriously, left and right, realizes that the H1B system is bad a point-based system is the way to go, which is why it's been part of every immigration reform proposal for over a decade with essentially no controversy. If this were the only aspect of immigration issues, or if people felt it was important enough to pull it out of broad immigration reform, it would pass in a heartbeat.

[Aeolun]

Japan will let everyone that can get a job in (and is willing to do the immigration process for them). This seems like a perfectly fair way to do things. If you don’t have a job, and can’t find a new one in 3-6 months, you have to leave again.

Don’t understand why other countries make it harder.

[tjpnz]

Japan (the country) doesn't do this. You still need a company to sponsor you and not every company can.

[Ray20]

Because other countries are not Japan, and if, say, the US were to pursue a similar policy, they would receive over 200 million immigrant workers and near-zero employment among the native population in the first two years

[jajko]

Switzerland is the same. By far the best implemented immigration policies in whole Europe, if only Germany and France egos would step down a notch, acknowledge their mistakes and take an inspiration from clearly way more successful neighbour. They have 3x more immigration than next country and it just works, long term.

EU would flourish economically and there would be no room for ultra conservative right to gain any real foothold (which is 95% just failed immigration topic just like Brexit was).

Alas, we are where we are, they slowly backpedal but its too little too late, as usually. I blame Merkel for half of EU woes, she really was a horrible leader of otherwise very powerful nation made much weaker and less resilient due to her flawed policies and lack of grokking where world is heading to.

Btw she still acknowledges nothing and keeps thinking how great she was. Also a nuclear physicist who turned off all existing nuclear plants too early so Germany has to import massive amount of electricity from coal burning plants. You can't make it up.

[throwaway2037]

Can you give more details here? I don't fully understand your post.

[catigula]

My understanding is that Bernie Sanders used to say that mass immigration was a "Koch brothers thing" and his tune on this has since changed to align with "progressive" ideas, but I might be mistaken.

I already know that the right-wing supports h1bs, Trump himself said so.

[gosub100]

He recently addressed Congress and brought up the abuse of H1B such as for entry level accounting positions. The program was to meet shortages for highly skilled positions. Now its being abused to cheat new grads out of jobs and depress wages

[SpicyLemonZest]

Even in his most immigration-skeptical era (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367869/bernie-sanders...), Sanders always acknowledged that some companies genuinely need a skilled immigration program to hire the global best and brightest. And note his line about "offshore outsourcing companies"; the issue's become even less controversial now that the balance of H1B sponsors is shifting towards large American tech companies who genuinely pay market rate.

[DonHopkins]

>Trump himself said so

TACO Trump himself said he'd reveal his health care plan in two weeks, many many years ago, many many times. But then he chickened out again and again and again and again and again. So that the buk buk buk are you talking about?

[bernawil]

was the left ever truly anti-immigration? I genuinely ask. Because the last leftwing explicitly pro-union movement I can remember was the late 90s/2000s anti-globalists, the ones that used to protest the G7 summits and the like. But they were in favor of immigration, so it always seemed contradictory. Anyway, it's not like the right doesn't have its own equally contradictory positions.

[bdangubic]

amen! that will never happen though, nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling (immigrants or otherwise…)

[andrekandre]

  > nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling

its almost as if we need a 'workers party' or something... though i'd imagine first-past-the-post in the u.s makes that difficult.

[kstrauser]

I agree with all of that. I've seen employers treat workers with H1B visas as slaves, basically. Local employees had a pretty decent work-life balance, but H1B employees got calls at 8PM on a Friday night to add a feature. And why not? What were they going to do quit (and have, what is it, something like 48 hours to get out of the country)?

I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that visa. Their lives sucked because there was little downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.

Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and whatnot. We absolutely could hire local employees to do those things. They weren't building quantum computers or something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like rented mules. It was infuriating.

[lokar]

It sucks that people are treated that way.

While working at Google I worked with many many amazing H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.

There was just no way I could see that we could replace these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not generally tell what someone’s status was).

[kstrauser]

I fully, completely support the idea of visa programs running like that. If you want to pay top dollar for someone with unique skills to move here and help build our economy, I am fully behind this.

But wanna use it as a way to undercut American jobs with 80-hour-a-week laborers, as I've personally witnessed? Nah.

My criticisms against the H1B program are completely against the companies who abuse it. By all means, please do use it to bring in world-class scientists, researchers, and engineers!

[c0redump]

This was true up until pretty recently. CS has come to be seen as a “prestigious” degree, and SWE as a “prestigious” career. Lots of kids who, 10 years ago, would have studied law, medicine, finance, or hard sciences, are studying CS. At my alma mater, CS is the largest major by a huge margin. The result of all this is there is a massive supply of smart and capable American citizens with formal training trying to break in to the job market, with limited success, due in no small part to the labor oversupply caused by immigration.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...

[guestbest]

If the foreign candidates were so much superior than locally born candidates as you explained, why not just open a campus in that country and thus save the best employees from having to uproot from their native culture?

[lokar]

Good question. In many cases they did. The Zurich office has people from all over Europe.

But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid splitting between locations. So you need someone local.

[ajmurmann]

Time zones can be a real issue even with remote work. There are of course also arguments for in-person collaboration.

[yobbo]

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads

One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured individuals. Just a theory.

[boredatoms]

I think that would backfire as the intrinsic culture of the company changes as it absorbs more people. Verticals would form from new hires who did manage to get promoted

[catigula]

It's also not correct to view people as atomized individuals. People band together on shared culture and oftentimes ethnicity.

[bradlys]

Which is exactly what has happened. Anyone in the industry for 15 years can easily see this.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

I will admit that this is the most plausible explanation of this phenomenon that explains the benefit to managers I have read on this issue so far.

[catigula]

Putting aside economic incentives, which the wealthy were eager to reap, the vast majority of the technical labor force in this country came and still comes from (outside of SF) a specific race and we have huge incentives that literally everyone reading this has brushed up against, whether in support or against, to alter that racial makeup.

Obviously the only real solution to creating an artificial labor shortage is looking externally from the existing labor force. Simply randomly hiring underserved groups didn't really make sense because they weren't participants.

Where I work, we have two main goals when I'm involved in the technical hiring process: hire the cheapest labor and try to increase diversity. I'm not necessarily against either, but those are our goals.

[throwaway2037]

Careerists: What does this term mean?

[TexanFeller]

People more concerned about getting a promotion than they are taking pride in doing quality work that makes a difference. Corporate rubrics for promotion have little to do with doing great work and careerists focus heavily on playing these stupid games set up by HR execs.

[throwaway2037]

Former President Obama (of the US) calls this a "false choice". Can you be both focused on the next promotion and providing lots of value in your current role? I think the answer is yes. Of course, there are people whom seem to produce nothing, but get promoted... in the case of software engineers, they are mostly promoted on the principle of "competance" -- You are a good software dev... so now your run this team (regardless if they are a good manager!).

[spoaceman7777]

It's also worth noting that it's almost entirely native born Americans that are pushing back against nepotism. Extreme nepotism is still the norm (an expectation even) in most South and East Asian cultures. And it's quite readily acknowledged if you speak to newer hires who haven't realized yet that it is best kept quiet.

It's a hard truth for many Americans to swallow, but it is the truth nonetheless.

Not to say there isn't an incredible amount of merit... but the historical impact of rampant nepotism in the US is widely acknowledged, and this newer manifestation should be acknowledged just the same.

[gedy]

I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

[catigula]

Just to note interpersonally I find pretty much any group to be great on average but being a participant of US labor and sympathetic to other US laborers this is clearly not something I can support.

[hluska]

You can’t support having a good enough relationship with coworkers from outside of your country that you can relate cheerful anecdotes about them?

[tcdent]

The language I use being from southern California has, on more than one occasion, sparked conversation about it.

Sorry, dude, it's like, all I know.

[therealpygon]

My opinion is that off-shore teams are also going to be some of the jobs more easily replaced, because many of these are highly standardized with instructions due to the turnover they have. I wouldn’t be surprised if these outsourcing companies are already working toward that end. They are definitely automating and/or able to collect significant training data from the various tools they require their employees to use for customers.

[lostlogin]

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with.

I hear this argument where I live for various reasons, but surely it only ever comes down to wages and/or conditions?

If the company paid a competitive rate (ie higher), locals would apply. Surely blaming a lack of local interest is rarely going to be due to anything other than pay or conditions?

[catigula]

The company having access to the global labor force is the problem we're explicitly discussing. This isn't seen as something desirable by US workers.

[lanstin]

I was born in NC, and I mostly have experienced the large amount of immigration as a positive. Most of the people I grew up were virulently anti-intellectuals, mocking math and science learning, and most of them have gone on to be realtors and business folks, bankers even. All the people I've met from China or South Asia (the two demographics I work most closely worth) value learning and science and math - not as some "lets have STEM summer camps" but when they meet some new 8 year old will ask them to solve some math problems (like precisely 1 of my kids' dozens of relatives).

I enjoy meeting the very smart people from all sorts of backgrounds - they share the values of education and hard work that my parents emphasized, and they have an appreciation for what we enjoy as software engineers; US born folks tend to have a bit of entitlement, and want success without hard work.

I interview a fair number of people, and truly first rate minds are a limited resource - there's just so many in each city (and not everyone will want to or be able to move for a career). Even with "off-shoring" one finds after hiring in a given city for a while, it gets harder, and the efficient thing to do is to open a branch in a new city.

I don't know, perhaps the realtors from my class get more money than many scientists or engineers, and certainly more than my peers in India (whose salaries have gone from 10% of mine to about 40% of mine in the past decade or two), but the point is the real love of solving novel problems - in an industry where success leads to many novel problems.

Hard work, interesting problems, and building things that actual people use - these are the core value prop for software engineering as a career; the money is pretty new and not the core; finding people who share that perspective is priceless. Enough money to provide a good start to your children and help your family is good, but never the heart of the matter.

[tilne]

Money is absolutely the heart of the matter for employees and employers. I think it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

[underlipton]

We all get 5 conspiracy theories before we advance from "understandably suspicious, given the complexity of the modern world" to "reliable tinfoil purchasers", and one of mine is that the prevalence of Indian execs and, to a lesser extent, Indian and Chinese workers in tech is a backdoor concession to countries who could open a demographic can of whoop-ass on us if they really wanted to. We let them bleed off the ambitious intellectuals who could become a political issue for their elite, and ours get convenient scapegoats for why businesses can't hire, train, and pay domestic workers well. As far as top men are concerned, it's a good deal.

Nadella ascending to the leadership of Micro"I Can't Believe It's Not Considered A State-Sponsored Defense Corp"soft is what got my mildly xenophobic (sorry) gears turning.

[hluska]

Edited:

Actually disregard, this isn’t worth it, but I don’t grant any freebies.

[underlipton]

Well, now I'm curious.

[jayd16]

I mean, aren't 3 out of 8 humans from India or China? If the company is big enough to appeal to a global applicant pool its a bit expected.

[sokoloff]

It’s presumably (from context) a company campus in the US that they’re taking about. I wouldn’t expect 3 of 8 legally authorized to work in the US people to be Chinese or Indian combined.

Other than a few international visitors, I’d expect the makeup to look like the domestic tech worker demographics rather than like the global population demographics.

[bradlys]

Also, anyone who has worked in these companies also know it’s much larger than 3 out of 8… comical to act like it’s only 3/8.

[senderista]

I estimate AWS engineering is maybe 80% Indian and another 10% Chinese. Less at higher levels though.

[bradlys]

It always blows my mind that 75% of H1B admittance is Indian. Then you live in SFBA for 10 years and it's not really a surprise anymore.

[apex3stoker]

I think most software companies hire from computer science graduates from US colleges. It’s likely that international students makes up a large percentage of these graduates.

[adamtaylor_13]

I’m realizing that 100% of all product managers I have ever worked with were just ZIRP-PMs.

I have never once worked with a product manager who I could describe as “worth their weight in gold”.

Not saying they don’t exist, but they’re probably even rarer than you think.

[boogieknite]

first job out of college i was one of these pms. luckily i figured it out quickly and would spend maybe 2 hours a day working, 6 hours a day teaching myself to program. i cant believe that job existed and they gave it to me. one of my teammates was moved to HR and he was distraught over how he actually had work to do

[icedchai]

I worked at a small company with more PMs than developers. It was incredible how much bull it created.

[cavisne]

My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.

These types all go to the same schools and do really well, interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a great career path and take them off the market.

Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.

[aswegs8]

How are TPMs optional? In my experience they provide more value than PMs that don't understand technology.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Perhaps the terminology differs between companies, but in my experience TPM means technical program manager. For large projects they were responsible for creating project Gantt charts, identify blockers early, and essentially "greasing the wheels" between disparate teams.

Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.