I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.
Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.
Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.
I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.
Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.
To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.
It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.
> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.
The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.
That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.
You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over.
If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.
>I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
True. This is Globalism at work. If these companies were not selling goods and services globally then they wouldn't have to deal with setting up offices, staff, pressure from local politicians to hire locals around the world.
Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.
And the original link about investment in India is also about fulfillment jobs and even worse, “investing in AI”, aka building data centers, which contribute essentially no jobs at all.
Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a statistic.
Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses:
1. Cuts were global
2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees
3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles
4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.
> 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees
Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q
That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here...
We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output.
Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.
I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.
> want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept...
There are no loopholes on H1B, it's working exactly as it was intended - replace, not just supplement - American workers with cheaper, more obedient tech slave workers dependent of their master-employer for their survival.
> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?
That's my opinion.
However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.
And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.
and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.
If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.
Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.
Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.
Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this.
Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea.
We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here.
De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance.
All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects.
America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.
I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital.
That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America.
Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.
The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).
Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.
H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
> H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
You say "we should want open borders" then argue for something that is objectively not open borders. "Open borders" and "controlled immigration" are diametrically opposed things, regardless of whatever liberal limits you're imagining. Almost nobody is arguing for zero immigration.
Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country.
Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself.
Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.
And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
They made a general claim that a big retailer in a country will have a big corporate presence in that country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my response.
They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which is why I asked a few follow up questions.
> You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to provide.
As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for the company and not bad for the affected workers.
People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s. Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet, of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped paying attention.
It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.
Outsourcing in the 90's/2000's failed because you didn't want to deskill engineers and reduce their scope, you wanted Jeff Dean building pagerank and building Google.
Outsourcing happens when the economy forces companies to cut costs. When innovations return substantial growth, most companies don't think much about the costs. We have a rough economy, bad tariff policy, a weakening dollar, and immigration policy that's reducing the overall US population (and with it, spend in the economy). All those factors push companies to need to cut costs
Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.
There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.
I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues
Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax.
America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable.
We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.
It would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).
Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.
Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.
Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.
Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary.
This is an old, and well tested strategy.
E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out of the US.
You can try putting more constraints on what will get a company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of structures, but as you indirectly point out, there are really only downsides to playing that game.
Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.
This is reductive and wrong. The billionares make money hand over fist either way. They own the companies. They don't care if the new campus or factory is in China or India. They skim their cut off it's productivity either way.
It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare.
The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo.
Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that collapse is when the meat suits will toss aside socialized truths of history and go crazy primate.
I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded)
If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get market access revoked from places like India. They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete, and Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.
Amazon themselves have experienced in the past how heavy-handed Indian regulators can be.
It’s not a zero-sum game anymore. You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.
Amazon has contributed enough to the current administration that I doubt they will face any consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side of the current administration.
Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0]
> [p]unish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues
They ain't doing squat.
The Trump admin is encouraging technology transfer to India as part of Pax Silica [0] and GOP politicans in Ag heavy Purple States like Iowa [1] and Montana [2] are trying to mollify India after China pivoted from American to Brazilian soybeans [3] and India began tariffing pulses/lentils [4].
Additonally, Indian ONG majors like Reliance are negotiating with the Trump admin to purchase Venezuelan oil now that Maduro is in custody [5] and India SOEs have starting creating partnerships with ExxonMobil [6], Chevron [7], and Phillips66 [7] to "drill baby drill".
As such, what are you going to do lol - Agriculture and Ag adjacent industries employs 22 million Americans [8] and the Energy sector employs 7 million Americans [9] mostly in Red and Purple states. Software only employs around 2 million Americans [10] in either Blue states or Blue pockets of Red States.
For the presidential election sure, but I wouldn't underestimate state level organization of the DNC in the rural west and Midwest.
The issue is fractured fundraising basically undermines the local organization by funding challenger candidates, which alienates local Dems and depresses turnout (TDP is notorious for this).
Iowa is going to be a competitive race hence why Joni Ernst decided to not run for reelection.
I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already.
Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.
> I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K
Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.
Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.
Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.
>native Americans
I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?
Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed?
Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?
you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.
I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.
FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.
You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.
Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.
Others like Google increased by 60+%.
You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.
There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).
But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).
>You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.
Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US?
>You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.
What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.
There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.
None of what you're saying is related to what the parent post is saying at all. He's saying, if the immigrants are exceptional, they should be on an O-1 visa, which is specifically designed for exceptional people. If they're not exceptional, then why not hire an unemployed American worker instead?
H1B supposedly is designed to address "shortages", but there are no actual shortages.
To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.
When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.
The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.
Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.
I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.
I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).
It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.
EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.
> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.
Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
> Indian recruiting firms
There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.
> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
I can't speak to all of those, but Doordash has extensively outsourced its software teams to India. I also know that lots of hospital software companies also outsource to India. Your FSA provider probably had someone in a call center transcribe an email incorrectly and we all know most call centers aren't in the US either...
> There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
You'd need to prove this statement. F500 companies have more money than most companies and pretty much exclusively hire through recruiters. If you were top talent and wanted to work for a top overseas company, it seems like working with a recruitment agency would be a no-brainer.
In any case, I had zero say in who to use. I was handed some contacts and told to make it work.
We used to have contractors/employees from a bunch of different countries (India, EU, Eastern Europe, South America, etc). Our (largely Indian) tech management pushed very hard for us to offshore to India exclusively.
We had to let people go who had been great contributors. Some of them were actually CHEAPER than the Indians who replaced them. I tried very hard to keep one of these people and after much politics up and down the management chain ultimately got "yes, he's a proven coder who does great work and costs less than all our recent Indian hires, but you have to let him go anyway because he's not based in India". I've never encountered something like that and it tells me that money wasn't the primary driving factor at all.
> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals.
Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.
Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.
We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.
What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff.
No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.
I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.
Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)
> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.
Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?
Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"
Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.
Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.
"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.
> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.
Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.
This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.
There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".
There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.
There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.
The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.
The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.
The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people.
Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is also far behind).
His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant) I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on the path to citizenship.
Do you think those companies would bat an eye about increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important.
Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to India centers suppresses white-collar wages.
Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job?
Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.
Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?
If you read this person's comments, looks like they are just making up crap. Apparently this one person has met or interviewed all the Indian H1Bs in the US.
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
The AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product.
The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.
This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?
I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
It’s only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and where the company has to find the skills where they exist. If that’s the US, then sure they’ll continue some small slice of employment here for those projects. But as you said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people severely underestimate the talent present in other countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85% of those teams could be in India.
Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.