Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1].
For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same as they would in Germany [5].
I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world) and not be pissy to Americans of non-European heritage and derogatorily calling us H1Bs.
Either way those of us who know how to take advantage of brutal raw capitalism win - especially as this administration is helping further enhance this offshoring [6] with technology transfers [7].
This is real. I work at one of the big tech and have access to their internal head count breakdowns. The overall headcount is mostly stagnant but the US headcount is decreasing with a corresponding increase in Europe and mostly India based HC.
The company I just left is firing as many people in the US as possible and rehiring primarily in India, with Dublin and Toronto by exception.
FedRAMP requires US persons on US soil, and so as far as Americans are concerned, only senior management and people working on the federal business are safe.
Is that true for everyone involved in the project? One of my friends works on a FedRamp project from Pune. Most engg and PMs are in Pune. Maybe the top mgmt and VPs need to be US-based?
No, just the people with privileged access to the system because of the way the data residency, personnel screening and other requirements interact.
You can have PMs or software engineers writing code from anywhere you like, but your engineers in Pune can’t go poking around your FedRAMP High prod environment.
“ Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Gold Card leads to a reserve brain drain”
Seems a lot of the Trump policies go exactly the opposite of what was planned. The supply people at my company are telling me that there is a huge push to move manufacturing away from the US due to tariffs.
The United States has a labor pool of over 170 million people. If you can't find Amazon workers in a country of that size, it's due to one thing and one thing only: you're a bigot who hates Americans. We can dance around it and dress it up like we have for the past thirty years but it's time to call it for what it is: bigotry and hatred wearing a dress of openness. Just admit what you are instead of continuing this absurd dance that pretends 170 million people are all defective. Now mash that down vote button to feel good about your bigotry that you've written "VIRTUE" all over to hide the destructive force it truly is.
When you buy services, is your bar good enough, or do you look for best value for money? And are those who try to optimise bigots merely for not buying from their local provider?
But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other office and not pay that cost? It's a self-own by the US.
No, it's about being able to hire more people at the same hiring bar and comp for companies hiring at scale, like (pre-2022) big tech. If you limit yourself to only hiring Americans in your US office, then you are at a talent disadvantage unless/until you open another office in a more friendly jurisdiction. And if you open such a satellite office and hire there, then that's worse for the US than if you had hired them in the US, because the US misses out on the income tax.
Many other countries have the exact same sorts of visas, because it is good to attract talented, high-paid workers to your country.
It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well.
Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off.
If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k jobs in GOP-leaning upstate NY, the CEO of that company (who also invented the entire field of flash memory) may as well hedge and shift abroad [1] helping other countries move up the HBM value chain [2]. And even the Trump admin is giving a helping hand [3][4].
If you can't respect our community, why shouldn't we geopolitically hedge as well?
Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1].
For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same as they would in Germany [5].
I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world) and not be pissy to Americans of non-European heritage and derogatorily calling us H1Bs.
Either way those of us who know how to take advantage of brutal raw capitalism win - especially as this administration is helping further enhance this offshoring [6] with technology transfers [7].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/us-loses-...
[1] - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...
[3] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
[6] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8
[7] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...