Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
huijzer.xyz196 points by huijzer 2 days ago
196 points by huijzer 2 days ago
I think this interpretation of the data rests on a misunderstanding of how a firm conceives of headcount. You saw this a lot during Covid layoffs when the press tried to point out the contradiction between hiring X number of people at the same time as firing Y number of people. Wasn't the firm just staying in place? Yet, in fact, the firm had planned to hire Z people that year, a number much greater than X, greater still than X+Y, and likely greater than Z_t-1, i.e. the number hired the previous year.
A firm's headcount is a dynamic value that is reflective of a rate of growth: its headcount is going up by x% each year, ideally linear growth or at least not a higher rate of growth than revenues or free cash flow. It requires an accounting perspective on the inflows and outflows of an ongoing process and not just a small slice of data. If you just look at that firm's hiring and firing in a particular year, subtracting the one from the other, you would appear to have shown that the firm was more or less simply replacing the other with the one. Yet, the main question for actually measuring the (firm and investor expected) impact of AI is whether that rate of headcount growth has changed without the stock price going down. That is, is it now proposed by management and accepted by investors that the firm will henceforth require less human labor in order to deliver on the present expected value of future free cash flow. You cannot infer anything about this question from the data shown.
There certainly is a separate question of whether a firm has changed its source of new hires, but that also isn't reflected in the data, which just shows approved visas against layoffs. For this, you would need to look at net hires year after year and prove that a growing percent thereof are H1-Bs.
What you describe is certainly possible, but it's not what's happening. You can go on Blind, Fishbowl, any work related subreddit, etc. and hear the same story over and over and over - "My company replaced half my department with H1Bs or simply moved it to an offshore center in India, and then on the next earnings call announced that they had replaced all those jobs with AI". There's a reason why "AI = Actually Indians" is a meme everywhere on the internet, and it isn't racism, it's just people observing the reality around them.
I’m not describing what’s happening right now — I’m saying the data shown in the article is insufficient to ground what it claims. The testimony you mention better supports the argument, but also is insufficient to show that this shift to H1-B is not in addition to a reduction of overall projected headcount due to AI.
Multiple things can be true at once. Some jobs have been eliminated by AI. The H1B system is being abused by employers. Offshoring has replaced more American jobs than H1Bs. Corporations are lying to investors about the impact of AI on their headcount. All of the above are true.
Again, however, the data in the article does not show that. The article is attempting to argue this point with facts (hard data), while not presenting said hard data. It's especially egregious because of the naming of specific companies.
> There's a reason why "AI = Actually Indians" is a meme everywhere on the internet
As a good reminder of the weird information bubbles the modern Internet has become, this is literally the first time I have ever seen this.
It might seem like it's "everywhere on the Internet" but it's really just what your Twitter/discord/subreddit/TikTok cohort are talking about.
And keep in mind, I'm a fellow HN user and likely overlap with you far more than even the average Internet user.
The US is getting outcompeted by India, basically.
>The US is getting outcompeted by India, basically.
And it almost completely comes down to housing costs. If half of your $150k salary wasn't going directly into a landlord's pocket in the US, we would easily be able to compete.
If that explains most/all of it, why don't we see more tech companies moving into areas of the US with low housing prices?
I guess some of it is the "captive" effect for an individual - if you leave the expensive property market for somewhere cheaper with a lower salary, it becomes very hard to move back to the expensive place. But is that a strong enough effect?
Surely an efficient free market should theoretically make tech companies much more geographically distributed?
Because low housing price areas are low priced for a reason.
US housing is pretty much mega fucked. The price is close to the maximum people are willing to pay. In many areas, it's well over that maximum.
There are also cultural differences in these low cost USA areas that will make it hard to find educated techies there and/or get them to move there. Like it or not, the socially-liberal urban-California culture has become a sort of "Defacto Standard Culture" for tech, and a company is not going to be able to simply move all these people to rural Alabama because the cost of housing and living is cheaper there.
When work-from-home became more widespread, my spouse and I did the whole "Oooh, where could we live to maximize our income/expense ratio!" Zillow fantasy-exploration, and we concluded that even though many places in the country are significantly cheaper than where we are, we would be miserable in these places.
Reminds me of that story that made the rounds on HN a few years ago about that techie who moved to Bumblefuck Arkansas and bought an insanely cheap office for his tech enterprise, and regretted it for years due to the place otherwise being a total shithole.
What could we do to produce educated techies in these low cost areas?
It seems like a USA specific problem because from my understanding low cost areas in much poorer countries produce many highly skilled educated techies. What are they doing differently from the US?
Those areas are producing educated techies. Those record them move to better areas.
Here's an idea, better education?
Replace the Bible with a science textbook.
There's plenty of science textbooks in our public schooling from what I've seen.
Many expanded to Texas, for example. Also Hollywood left LA. There aren’t any/many desirable locations left in the US that have low housing costs.
People perhaps don't like the word desirable here. What I meant is not just pretty streets, but many other factors, such as nearby industry, infrastructure, educated workforce (in the thing you need), reasonable weather/sunshine, etc.
Yeah, you can find something cheap, but often it is cheap for a reason. Especially when the whole country has a housing shortage. I'm sure Alaska is beautiful, for example.
Alaska is beautiful, but the polar opposite (no pun intended) of where someone should be looking for LCOL. Alaska is outrageously expensive for myriad reasons, and it is also not exempt from the nationwide housing crisis / greed crisis.
Or you could say the ruling class is generously donating their software industry to India, much like they generously donated their manufacturing industry to China.
> It requires an accounting perspective on the inflows and outflows of an ongoing process and not just a small slice of data.
Correct, but we don't have that information so we have to rely on a best guess. We're not dealing with code here where everything is known exactly.
> Yet, the main question for actually measuring the (firm and investor expected) impact of AI is whether that rate of headcount growth has changed without the stock price going down.
Stock price is not necessarily a proxy for headcount either. Some companies have much lower headcounts per stock price (for example, Nvidia).
> That is, is it now proposed by management and accepted by investors that the firm will henceforth require less human labor in order to deliver on the present expected value of future free cash flow.
You are just talking without thinking now are you? It makes no sense. Human labor and free cash flow are probably correlated, but one isn't a proxy for the other. First you relate stock price to headcount and then you say "that is" and then you suddenly relate cash flow to headcount. Cash flow and stock price are correlated per industry, but it's also a very loose one.
> You cannot infer anything about this question from the data shown.
False. I only need to infer a tiny bit in order to falsify your extremely strong claim.
> For this, you would need to look at net hires year after year and prove that a growing percent thereof are H1-Bs.
Yes, this is something concrete that I can agree on. But how would you prove that given that we don't have access to that data?
Apologies if my presentation is inadequate, but I’m not suggesting that stock price is a proxy for headcount. I’m simply arguing that you have to look at the two together in the context of a particular firm — for exactly the reason you note, ie NVIDIA has a lower head count per share etc. It’s the ratio that matters and is the best proxy we have for inferring the cause of a shift in hiring. Lower growth of headcount and stock price going down suggests the cause of the former is reduced expectation of return, ie particular industry or general economic slowdown; lower growth of headcount and stock price remaining constant or rising would be more suggestive of (not causal proof of course) of an AI-related effect.
If we don’t have the data we shouldn’t argue that the data we do have says what it doesn’t. I actually agree with you and the author that trying to figure out what’s going on in labor markets right now is incredibly important — but for that very reason we have to be careful not to accept too easy conclusions. There’s a lot of information we do have about firm expenditure on labor within public filings — I’ll actually try to pull some figures this weekend, can let you know when I do if you’re interested. I think the interesting question on the AI side is whether it allows more firms to present a ratio like NVIDIA, ie reducing expenditure on labor that is considered a “cost center” in a particular industry.
>> lower growth of headcount and stock price remaining constant or rising would be more suggestive of (not causal proof of course) of an AI-related effect.
Since stock prices are basically future expectations, wouldnt it probably be because investors expect the company to be more efficient cashflow wise? (Earn more per employee)
Not necessarily because they already are more cashflow efficient?
> Yes, this is something concrete that I can agree on. But how would you prove that given that we don't have access to that data?
Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you? For all we know companies are hiring a higher percentage of American workers now. All we know from the data shown is that companies are hiring some new H1-B holders and retaining a lot of existing H1-B holders.
> given that we don't have access to that data?
Actually, we do have some of that data. You can just look at the H-1B employer datahub, filter by Google (or whichever other employer you want to scrutinize), and then look at the crosstab.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
Looking at Google specifically, I observe two things:
1. The number of new approvals has gone down drastically since 2019 (2019: 2706, 2020: 1680, 2021: 1445, 2022: 1573, 2023: 1263, 2024: 1065, 2025: 1250). (These numbers were derived by summing up all the rows for a given year, but it's close enough to just look at the biggest number that represents HQ.)
Compared to the overall change in total employees as reported in the earnings calls (which was accelerating up through 2022 but then stagnated around 2025), we don't actually see much anything noteworthy.
2. Most approvals are either renewals ("Continuation Approval"), external hires who are just transferring their existing H-1B visas ("Change of Employer Approval"), and internal transfers ("Amended Approval").
> Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you?
We're not dealing with software here. It's not black and white. We can try to make best guesses and then try to support it by evidence or reject it by evidence. A theory that is presented is that H1-B appear to replace US workers, but you are encouraged to provide another theory by using evidence.
> All we know from the data shown is that companies are hiring some new H1-B holders and retaining a lot of existing H1-B holders.
And why do you think that's not suitable evidence for the given theory? Another possible point of data that seems to point in the same direction could be the US Employment-Population Ratio, which, apart from some ups and downs, seems to have been steadily going down since 2000 [1]. More specifically, California's unemployment rate seems to go up since 2021 [2]. But these two data sources are way more broad than just big tech of course.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO
[2]: https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/top-statistics.html
Of course it’s not black and white: it’s the very fact that there are so many possible explanations of the current changes that makes pretending data supports a given explanation more than another when it doesn’t so misleading. There’s no doubt that offshoring and H1-B hiring is an important trend — as it has been since the 1990s, NAFTA etc. We don’t need this article to tell us that. The difficult question is whether AI is actually introducing a new dynamic into the situation. The article suggests it isn’t. All I’m arguing is that, whether or not the conclusion is ultimately true, the data presented does not shed light on this important question.
Without knowing how many beneficiaries were approved in prior years we don't even know if there is a net increase in H1Bs. They have to be renewed every few years.
You also need to consider the impact of offshoring. Accenture's layoffs of 11,000 workers is listed in the chart, but a few days earlier they announced they were opening a new campus in India and hiring 12,000.
I don't disagree, but this has been the trend since the 1990s. This was the whole question of "globalization" and all the debates about NAFTA etc. The only anomaly was that people came to believe (in 2020? maybe even 2016...) that "globalization was over" and that now we saw the reverse trend. That seems to be leading people to now believe that this offshoring is something new, when the most likely interpretation is that it never went away.
None of the above, however, begins to touch the question of whether AI has, is or will introduce an entirely new dynamic into the equation. I'm not sure myself of the answer to this question, but I believe it's a very important one and shouldn't be dismissed too quickly -- certainly not by the continued presence of an undeniable tendency of labor markets that has long been observed.
Seems like you missed H1B visa rules change.
They basically move all H1B from US to India not to deal with $100k per employee.
Nothing changes just Indian guys move back to India and will be spending money there instead of sending some money there.
Labor really is not fungible that way. On shore H1B Indians generally are higher skilled than offshore Indians, perform different roles at companies, and are paid more. Many of them could have chosen different careers than Tech and likely will if they move back to India.
Or: instead of talented software engineers around the world being drawn to the US, they stay home and build deep talent pools in their home country or in the next non-US SV. In the long run the onshore/offshore becomes less and less about quality and cost tradeoffs.
We're giving away our long term dominance of tech for xenophobia and the possibility of short term job growth
Labor is not fungible, but that doesn't matter. What matters is if (largely stupid) investors and executives think labor is fungible.
Which, from what I've seen, they do. Its not, and it will backfire, but that's never stopped anyone.
Why not just move US H1Bs back to India and keep paying them US wages? They will be filthy rich in India, their living standards will literally skyrocket. They will be highly unlikely to leave. And keep them on same roles as they did in US.
Why do you think GCCs now exist?
The leadership in a GCC are all ex-US EMs, PMs, PMMs, and FP&As who are given the option to take a haircut on their US salary and build a hiring pipeline within India while meeting the company's hiring requirements.
Tech salaries in India have already converged with much of the EU, especially for top talent.
To be clear, I'm not 'missing' that -- I'm saying it's part of a trend since the 1990s ("globalization") that, for various reasons, people believed stopped in 2016/2020.
Corporate America really thinks we are that stupid
We are, the whole western world is oblivious to this correlation.
Even pointing it out like this will cause people to process it and move on as if it's not the common case.
I think most people don’t feel like they have much control over their world and resign themselves to it. This atomization is a central feature of the pseudo-stable system we live under. The antidote is solidarity and collective action. But that requires bravery to jump start because people only tend to turn to that when circumstances become truly bleak.
Looking at who you elected (twice!!) I don't know how wrong they are.
Plenty of layoffs and offshoring have occurred under Democratic administrations as well. Both parties serve the wealthy against the working class. One is indeed more brazen about it however.
The man who just instituted a policy requiring companies to pay $100k per H1-B visa?
Maybe US voters aren’t so stupid after all.
> Maybe US voters aren’t so stupid after all.
They are still waiting for cheap groceries and that’s what they voted for!
He didn’t “institute” anything. He can’t do it without getting a law passed.
That’s just like the “deal” he made with Nvidia that Nvidia would pay 15% of revenue for every processor shipped to China.
The CFO of Nvidia said on the earnings call that it doesn’t matter what deal someone at his company made with Trump, he isn’t authorizing any funds transfer until there is a law passed.
Even my mid sized company when asked when they would start allowing private equity and crypto based on Trump’s announcement, they said not until a law is passed by Congress.
On a completely separate note, of the large tech companies can’t get H1Bs cheaply, they will continue to expand their presence outside of the country.
Friendly reminder that America is not a single person, but a very large country filled with many different opinions.
You realize that the large country you're mentioning, with many opinions, still elect 1 president, who represents that large country with different opinions?
No, I don't realize that, because it's laughably false. The president is not elected to represent me, that's what Congress is supposed to be for. A single man cannot possibly represent a country of 340 million people. It's understandably easy for people from smaller countries to not be able to fathom just how big and divided America is.
It's exactly the same thing man. 34 million people is pretty unfathomable too. One person can't truly represent all those just like one person can't truly represent 340 people. Unless of course those 340 people all self selected to follow that one person, but that's not how countries work. In all cases the members of the group choose whoever gets the most votes and everyone is never happy. The semantics of how the voting works may change but at the end of the day the people chose their president. And it just so happens the US chose a disgraceful orange clown twice.
For all their biglyness and dividedness, that's who they managed to unite behind. You can explain it however you want, to me it definitely means something and it's not a good thing.
You realize that no more than a third of the people in the country actually voted for said president?
You realize, that it doesn't change the fact, that the elected president represents that large country with many opinions?
I genuinely believe that, at this point, that starts to stretch the definition of the word "represents."
It's readily apparent that no president for the past decade has clearly represented a majority of the country (as opposed to a plurality) in the sense that they voted for or supported him. But Trump has gone further, and openly declared that not only does he not consider himself to represent the people politically opposed to him, he considers them to be dangerous violent extremists.
At what point do you admit that a fascist dictator no longer meaningfully "represents" the people he rules?
When they stop voting for him, and when the people who are supposedly against him actually get off the couch and vote against him, how about that?
Please keep in mind many non-voters aren't laying around on the couch, but working multiple jobs trying to pay rent and healthcare. Our unitary president is talking about restricting mail in voting and taking other measures to ensure the desired outcome.
He's already resorted to sending fake electors, demanding votes be 'found', and inciting violence to interrupt the results of elections he doesn't like. (And pardoning those found guilty of participating in such interference on his behalf.)
Trump is trying hard to get voter id passed (common sense in Europe) and he’s obviously not doing that because he wants to cheat in elections. Your characterization is therefore misguided in the extreme.
We only need to look at states like California and their complete absence of voter id to realize where and for whom rampant election fraud takes place.
You'd get most Democrats to support voter ID if it came with a national ID card, plus an affirmative duty to some agency to ensure that everyone has access to one.
We have neither of those things. The closest we have is driver's licenses, because our culture is such that everyone eligible wants one. The only broadly available federal photo ID is the passport.
Requiring a driver's license, passport, or equivalent is unconstitutional, though. This is because even non-driver equivalents cost money in most places, making it an unconstitutional poll tax. That's why even the places with strict voter ID laws allow really strange forms of identification - they rely mostly on people not knowing this.
Voter ID in a country without universal identification is just disenfranchisement. In the US, by and large you either have a driver's license, or no form of identification. Sure, states have non-driver's IDs available, but very few people have them. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the population have zero up-to-date photo identification.
Voter fraud (people voting twice, voting illegally, etc) is basically a non-issue, especially in California where our elections are rarely so close that the marginal amount that's estimated to happen matters. Disenfranchisizing 9% of the population is a big fucking issue.
> We only need to look at states like California and their complete absence of voter id to realize where and for whom rampant election fraud takes place.
rampant election fraud isn't taking place at all.
When republicans want voter id passed they do it because they want to suppress votes. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impa...
There are ways to make voter ID work, ways to make them free and easy to obtain, but they aren't interested in any of that because they just want to stop "the wrong people" from voting.
He tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with the false slates of electors in various states.
We don’t have to theorize if he’s the kind of man who would cheat in an election when he has already done it before
That's a mischaracterization of what took place. The alternate slates of electors were exactly what is prescribed legally and had to exist in case the courts ruled in his favor. If the alternate electors didn't exist, and the case was successful, too bad, so sad, original electors are sent to DC. That's why the electors who were charged with crimes had the charges all dropped. You were witnessing lawfare and media distortions of actual long-standing, but little used processes.
It is not a mischaracterization. Him and his people organized false slates of electors who tried to fraudulently claim that they were the official slate of electors for their state.
You are factually mischaracterizing what happened. It wasn’t just backup slates in case their case went through.
It’s actually the more legally damning set of actions he took compared to J6
> he’s obviously not doing that because he wants to cheat in elections
No, that's exactly why he wants to do it.
Requiring voter ID makes it much harder for poor people—disproportionately likely to be minorities, vastly more likely to be city-dwellers (who don't need a driver's license)—to vote.
There is no rampant vote fraud. There have been many, many studies on this. Even the ones from Republicans prove that there are no more than a tiny, tiny handful of people who ever deliberately try to vote where they're not eligible (including multiple voting, etc).
The billions of dollars poured into post-industrial revolution, pro-capitalist propaganda in US politics mean we cannot simply blame the populace for being brainwashed or wrong. This is a concerted effort over many generations, people are born into the propaganda machine and biased media. Fixing this starts from the top.
Maybe you don’t understand what happened and you should study this more instead of believing you’re smarter than those electors
Maybe you could enlighten me? Cause it looks to me like he won an election.
I watch Trump speak and it just baffles me that anyone could possibly take him seriously. It's so abundantly clear that the guy just makes shit up on the spot, constantly. The guy lies more than he tells the truth and it's obvious. I'm not even a native English speaker and it's clear as day to me that pretty much every word out of that guy's mouth is bullshit.
I watch Trump interacting with other world leaders where they're struggling to keep their composure, the stuff he says and does is so ridiculous these serious, accomplished adults are about to lose it laughing in his face because he's so ridiculous.
And on top of that there's all the downright criminal stuff he pulled last time, like staging a coup, stealing classified documents (boxes and boxes worth, not just a couple sheets that fell behind the sofa), and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven't heard about. Oh and apparently he used to be besties with Epstein. You can not make this up, I almost could not imagine a worse leader. And I'm barely even paying attention to what's going on over there.
On the bright side at least we're getting some good laughs out of it like when Giuliani booked a press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping next to a porn shop. That was fun.
You can be a smart politician and do stupid things. You can be dumb and vote for a smart politician. You can be a stupid politician and do not-that-bad-compared-to-the-smart-politician things. You can be smart and vote for a stupid politician.
Sure, a broken clock is right twice a day. And sure, you can be smart and vote for Trump. Maybe you just genuinely want the chaos and his policies. It's probably good for some people.
But it's not good for normal people. Normal people vote for Trump and then turn around and cry that their insulin and other meds are suddenly too expensive again. Lots of stuff like that. Normal people are very clearly not well served by Trump's politics. Yet they vote for him anyway and that's just stupid.
It's always a tradeoff, it's not about the broken clock. And the most probable alternative to Trump wasn't especially good either
If you are looking for offshore proof employment it is worth noting that defense contractors are scrambling to find qualified help. 3 conditions: 1. Work on site typically 100% because classified systems are not 'net connected. 2. No drug use. Not even THC, even if your state "legalized" it. Still illegal at the federal level. 3. No criminal history, at least in the last 10 years. 4. Must pass a FBI background check and clearance interview.
> 2. No drug use. Not even THC, even if your state "legalized" it.
This is getting slowly released for a few years now: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/government-loosens-past-drug-...
I wouldn’t try to draw any conclusions from what Accenture does. The firm is grasping at straws now that they can no longer suckle at the taxpayer teat.
I don't see how the data presented necessarily leads to anything remotely close that conclusion with any real confidence.
If anything the biggest H1B user - amazon - seems to have done negligible layoffs.
Yes, without knowing H1B beneficiaries in prior years its impossible to even conclude they've had a net add of them, since they have to be renewed every few years. I'm sure there are some net adds, but we have no idea how many.
> I don't see how the data presented necessarily leads to anything remotely close that conclusion with any real confidence.
You are not providing a counterargument apart from the fact that "you don't see". Well. Thanks for sharing I guess.
And OP is not claiming to provide a counter argument.
They’re claiming, correctly, that the presented argument is invalid.
They’re not even contesting the conclusions. Only that the information provided in the linked article does not justify the conclusion.
Why hire an h1-b when you can shift the entire campus abroad? Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have definitely been doing that.
This practice hurts all state side workers, citizen and h-1b alike.
Interestingly, the folks I've actually seen replaced by AI the most have been offshore workers in entry level roles.
Things like Indian call center roles are low hanging fruit for AI replacement in my recent experience.
I know there are stories of H1-B farms but my personal experience is H1 visas were only used to move people who otherwise would be living in a foreign country, being less productive (due to TZ skew) and not paying US taxes, employing people to cut their hair etc, to the US. Me and my former colleagues on those visa must have bought a few F35...
Well your personal experience doesn’t support the facts — see the WITCH companies.
I'm more of the belief that:
- Layoffs would have happened anyway, natural cycle of shedding underperformers.
- the current crop of graduates have too little AI experience from their education, and too little practical experience to be useful in an industry re-arranging itself.
- the average developer quality (i.e. boot camps & curriculum) has dropped the value of "a developer" from a manager's perspective, up to the point that an average Actual Indian is competitive (even when accounting for the communication overhead/loss).
Combined, that shows fewer people on the books, which they'll obviously frame in the best light; i.e. frugal & good management + innovative AI.
> the average developer quality (i.e. boot camps & curriculum) has dropped the value of "a developer" from a manager's perspective
If that’s true, I would say it’s because there are simply more developers (therefore more below average developers), not because the good developers are getting less good.
If anything, my experience is that the top developers are far better now.
For an internship position I’m hiring for, I’m getting resumes with several previous internships, a top 20 university’s CS degree, research lab experience, side projects, (brief) exposure to a myriad of languages and tools, and certifications. For an internship, that’s far above what I or my peers had when we were interns.
> the current crop of graduates have too little AI experience from their education
Why would you need education to understand how to use the thing that means you don't need education
I see fairly few people claiming effectively using AI doesn’t require learning anything. I see a lot of people claiming it requires learning a lot less than traditional methods.
> the current crop of graduates have too little AI experience from their education
They probably have more "AI" (read: LLM) experience than working professionals. Not like chatGPT came out last week, they've had it their entire undergrad.
Also, that's like saying "they don't have enough experience using google" which is just absurd. You type shit into a text box and see what gets shat back out. If it doesn't work, you adapt it.
Prompt engineering is not hard. At best, it takes days-to-weeks learning how to prompt. I think people who are proud of themselves for spending hours carefully crafting prompts are trying to justify the time spent. It isn't hard.
I’ve worked with both H1B and offshore Indian workers and there is a huge amount of variance in the quality of their work.
This is going to either surprise management or, more likely, have them obfuscate the work done in order to hide certain details of poor performance.
The best workers will have to be compensated somehow, so there will be some opaque org chart setup to allow it.
Didn't we already see this in like 15-20 years ago? Companies thought they could outsource project to India, the consulting companies put their best developers on design, prototyping, code samples, interviews, everything, once the contract was in place, the actual work got moved to the meeeh tier developers.
Often we also saw management pick the cheapest outsource partner, because otherwise it didn't really make a ton of sense in terms of saving on cost. They then acted very surpised when they got the exact quality they paid for.
In the current era, I'm concerned that development will be shifted to the cheapest option, and those people can barely code and will just type everything into an AI chatbot, not understanding the output.
We had one consultant from an outsourcing partner come to our offices for two weeks during the start up fase. This dude would just rip through code yelling: No, no, no... NOOOO, this is shit! That was the point where we knew that we found the right outsourcing team.
There's also the huge cultural gap, where in Indian culture gaming the system is considered smart, while in other countries unethical.
There seems to a misunderstanding of H1B data. "Beneficiaries Approved" as a data point includes:
1. Extensions - H1B is approved for years. Once that period is complete employers need to extend it for another 3 years.
2. Amendments - This will include new job/employer. So, this does mean new H1B employee on the payroll but not exactly new H1B being brought from India.
3. New Hires - Completely new H1B hires.
For example, Google's count might include a rolling set of employees requiring H1B extension before they file I-140 petition, H1Bs from Infosys jumping ship to Google for a handsome pay increase and new H1B employees. So, there is no 1:1 comparison.
That said, I know Google departments being offshored but mostly due to the software tax code change in US. That has now been rolled back. So, hiring should pick up a bit.
As pointed in the H1B fees threads - Corporations always look to maximize benefits. If Accenture and their US clients think that their contracts will be cheaper if they have 3 H1B employees instead of 10 and let rest 7 work out of India, then that is what they will do. H1B fees is just going to make things worse. There is no good way to stop this globalization.
That said I think Accenture story is full of air. Its right there in the article > It is not immediately clear how much Accenture intends to invest in setting up the campus.
I don’t know about people’s anecdata but this data does not support the claim it makes.
Skills aren’t interchangeable and there is no universal hiring pool called “IT” under which you can hire anyone with an engineering degree and so an H1B swap becomes the only answer.
There are a large number of pools of specializations that fall into and out of favor with time, with people transitioning between them (as they should!). AI has fallen into favor and some frontend/backend jobs have fallen out. Is this what this data shows? Maybe? We’d never know.
worrying about H1B is looking at the wrong metric. Most companies are past H1B - the game is now offshore stuff.
Look at the data: e.g a company like Rippling where a good portion of Software engineering jobs are in India. then Senior / Staff Roles are in the US. Most scale ups startups have similar dynamics. It could be India or Eastern Europe.
That's the A.I eating software jobs.
Association is no proof of cause. How many h1b were issued the years before AI? Has there been an increase? My bet is: no.
> How many h1b were issued the years before AI? Has there been an increase?
That still wouldn't prove anything per your logic because, as you say, "Association is no proof of cause." But then the question is how could we ever proof anything like this?
> How many h1b were issued the years before AI?
The point is that companies are lying off people and saying it's AI and the economy while they still hire foreign workers. That suggests they are not telling the full story. Whether or not they are issuing more visas than before does not affect this conclusion.
Who cares if you never find proof? This doesn't mean that what is unproven is true. Otherwise, Shiva god may be truely existing. You can't disprove that, right?
This is also assuming that 100% of layoffs are American citizens. A huge chunk of those layoffs are H1B workers themselves.
The hard truth for Americans (I am talking about Americans because most of these are large cap US companies) is that other countries are cheaper for the following reasons:
1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitive at various stages and serve as strict filters against laggards, and there’s less consideration for meeting basic human needs in some countries. But in others there are different options where many students naturally find themselves (like less paying or blue collar work), and if that were to happen in the U.S. then inequality advocates will have a lot to say, and they wouldn’t be wrong.
2) There are a lot of realpolitiks at play when you have a multicultural society as people will often have dual allegiances. A CEO or hiring manager from country X or Y will want to favor their country of origin, naturally. It becomes easier to justify some decisions when the bottom line is also helped by said decisions by hiring cheaper labor.
3) The most expensive thing on the U.S. budget books for employers, employees and the government is social security and Medicare. Some countries simply deny their citizens and workers social security and access to welfare programs, which helps keep the cost of employing them down.
4) Even if a global corporate tax rate is set, it will still make labor in countries that don’t ask for social program contributions much cheaper.
5) The rule of law situation in some of these countries is less than ideal, and so living there can be a hit or miss, which is why H1-Bs are a popular choice for both employers and non-U.S. employees.
6) But still it seems that regional security and stability in some regions has led to permissive environments for unrestricted work. This situation isn’t going to change for nuclear countries, unless they’re like Russia (screwed by economic sanctions and expansionist desires).
So in the short-term, unless there’s some agreement to be made between countries for balancing their labor market loads, then economic sanctions seem like a terrible last resort.
Addendum, I think the hard truth for large cap companies is that they never should have been allowed to get that big, and in many cases their growth was aided by direct investment by the U.S. government. There’s an interesting lesson here for policy makers about balancing power and investments. Maybe the U.S. should divert future government spending to only its research labs.
The thing is: it’s nothing new. In early 2000s there was a wave of outsourcing that caused panic in the US. Back then, the difference in salaries was even higher than nowadays. In some cases it worked out well for the employers, but in many cases it did not for various reasons.
And people in other countries are just way poorer, live in a society where everybody is way poorer, and therefore they are happy with way lower wages.
No, the top "cost" problems with hiring Americans are America's out-of-control costs for education, health care, and housing. Those industries (or existing homeowners, for housing) are growing obscenely fat and rich. And really don't care if they destroy America's economic future as a side-effect.
> Those industries (or existing homeowners, for housing) are growing obscenely fat and rich.
The problem is, sure, your house that your parents built for 100k in the 80 is worth 1 million dollars on paper, just because of urbanization. But that "wealth" is pretty much useless, at least as long as you reside there it can't be realized. So you either have to sell off the existing home and find a new place to live which only makes sense if you move to a drastically lower CoL area, or if you're of old age you may get away with living off the equity by getting a HELOC backed by the home - the downside of that is of course that your children won't have much of an inheritance left.
That's also why taxing real estate on land value is a very, very bad idea - land values rise exponentially or at the very least far faster than wages, which forces rent hikes for renters and forces off old established businesses and ordinary people.
> That's also why taxing real estate on land value is a very, very bad idea - land values rise exponentially or at the very least far faster than wages
If you tax real estate, owners of real estate will make sure it's not overvalued by encouraging more real estate to be built.
Land values have risen faster than wages due to growing wealth inequality - whereas as land value tax does not pass, empirically speaking, through to renters - because there is a fixed amount of land. In other words higher land value taxes could have helped mitigate or even cancel the the disconnect between wage and housing costs that we have become afflicted by in this upward transfer of wealth.
Yes, that $1M house is a pretty illiquid asset.
But consider the PoV of an average-ish (say) 65-year-old homeowner. He knows he could live to 95 or so, that medical costs go up far faster than the official US gov't inflation rates, and that being in a nursing home (which he might need for 5+ years) is already ungodly expensive. And that the thundering herd of older-than-him boomers may have trampled Social Security and Medicare to death before he starts really needing those.
He ain't got $10M's in other assets, to say "whatever; I can afford it".
The "value" of that house, and the idea that it could somehow keep appreciating far faster than inflation - those things are really, really important to that homeowner.
Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.
I think it depends on what you mean by "cheap foreign engineers." I am born and raised Canadian. I make a decent chunk less than my American counterparts, even when working for the same company. Not because they are necessarily better suited for the job, but literally because of the country I live in. The same is true for engineers all over the world.
So yes, companies absolutely can get cheap(er) labour and have the same, or at least similar, quality.
Let’s ask a different question: if money didn’t matter at all, why hire a foreigner vs someone local?
The foreigner from your point of you is a local to the market that companies like Amazon or Meta are serving. It's easier to understand what appeals to that market from the ground rather than the US west coast.
That depends on what kind of “cheap” engineers you hire.
If the SV engineers make 250K, you can hire: a) cheap engineers for 150K euro or, b) cheap engineers for 50K euro
I can tell you that the engineers in group A are top notch, nothing to envy the SV ones… and yet they are cheap for american companies.
Believe it or not there is talent even in countries where salaries are lower. For 3000 - 4000 USD month you can get good english speaking senior engineers in Vietnam used to work in international environments. Not FAANG tier but strong fit for most $CRUD companies. This is cheaper than US by far, although the gap with Europe is unironically closing.
As someone that routinely works in offshoring projects, most business don't care, even if there are escalations as long as total cost remains under doing everything in the country, upper management is happy.
An example is the amount of crap software that exists out there, that people would rather use with a race to bottom prices, instead of paying for quality.
How about this: hire 25% less engineers in Europe but use the same wage as in US.
> 3) The most expensive thing on the U.S. budget books for employers, employees and the government is social security and Medicare. Some countries simply deny their citizens and workers social security and access to welfare programs, which helps keep the cost of employing them down.
Holy cope batman!
A whole bunch of countries...just provide those things as government services too! You can employ whoever you want and not become a health insurer and the taxes that employee pays will fund a very large risk pool, what a concept!
Came in to say this.
The level of confidence my fellow Americans have in their understanding of the rest of the world without knowing anything about the rest of the world is always hilarious to watch.
Even India has a vast network of completely free government provided healthcare. Of course, the quality leaves a lot to be desired but bit beats walking into the ER to receive basic care and bankruptcies due to medical debt, which must be a uniquely American phenomenon.
Countries where most white collar jobs are being offshored to expect on average 10-12% social security contribution from employers. In some of these countries, less than 50% qualify to be on social security. Collectively, the U.S. employer and employee pay 12% towards it, but higher cost of living requires setting salaries higher to compensate, and all US workers except illegal immigrants qualify for social security.
Please actually look at the hard facts before you say this, not everywhere is Europe.
And in Europe some countries you have to pay for social contributions and pension tax etc.
The video link that's posted on the article is all over the place. IMO, it's hard to state what her conclusion was since it's not concrete at all. In the first half, similar to the post itself, the video argues that since there is H1B approvals for these companies which laid off workers, that means that citizens are being replaced by immigrants. In the second half it states that warehouse workers and other unskilled jobs are getting replaced by AI. And it (with a bit of snark) asks why if AI is so good , they still need to hire H1B workers.
But that is exactly the point. H1B workers aren't workhouse workers. They are doing tech work. Saying companies are doing lay off and hiring H1Bs doesn't in any way establishes what kind of workers are getting laid off and what kind of workers are getting hired.
As others have pointed it out, the data presented is so insufficient to such a degree that in this particular case, I have to wonder if this is genuine curiosity of the author of the post or if they are trying to justify their beliefs using bad data science.
Genuine question: what's the relation between "beneficiaries approved" and "# of layoffs"?
In Prometheus' term, the "beneficiaries approved" is neither a counter nor a gauge. It doesn't tell you the percentage of H1b holders amongst all full time employees and certainly don't include H1b contractors. It also don't include other temporary visa types like L1 or H4, both could be "cheap foreign labors".
The "# of layoffs" also doesn't provide much information about how many H1b holders are part of the layoffs.
The goal of combining the two columns seems to be giving reader a fuzzy feeling that they are correlated, to support the author's narrative.
Everyone who works in tech knows this is true and has been happening for longer than described in the article. Since 2020, it feels like I've trained half of Bangalore on how to do our jobs.
How do they save money by hiring people in the US with H1B? Most of these companies have compensation policies so it’s not like they can hire a person at the same level and pay a lot less…
They weren't lying, they just meant AI = Affordable Indians
A company replacing domestic workers by cheaper H1-B workers. As opposed to a company shutting down because foreign competitors took their marketshare. In either case, domestic company is not competitive. Protectionism won't make the domestic company more competitive.
This text reminds me much of tylervigen.com/spurious-correlation. The data presented is completely insufficient for the claim and based on cherry picked narratives. Anyone can slice and cut numbers the way they want to prove a point.
The problem is that hiring an American is so expensive even for America. This will not change. People will need to accept to earn much less than they expected or to have the jobs taken elsewhere.
The root cause of the problem is exactly why Chinese clone products and cheaper versions are on the run. They are in inferior quality many times BUT they are way cheaper. American people buy Chinese products because there is not enough money to spend everywhere, so we stretch our definitions of what is acceptable to cover more areas of our lives.
These recent changes only seems to be effective but do effectively nothing to solve any of the problems. But let's say magically all immigrants disappeared and companies needed to find replacements, what would happen?
- Companies will look to outsource to keep prices at same level - Companies will use AI for whatever is "good enough" - Companies will hire much less capable people and boost them with AI - Companies will hire capable people but pay less because they could have hired someone cheaper - Companies will be forced to pay more for Americans, mean average salary will increase so as every cost, which is basically inflation.
The expedite use of "urgent/emergency" measurements is unsettling as-if US was under constant attack and panic and needs to defend themselves against evil outside world to a level where congress and laws can be totally ignored.
This need of creating an enemy and the constant threat to solidify a heavy power that goes beyond any limits is in itself a threat. Even more now that a this power is being shared among those who can keep eyes and ears on you and your ears and eyes out of the real problems.
> This text reminds me much of tylervigen.com/spurious-correlation. The data presented is completely insufficient for the claim and based on cherry picked narratives. Anyone can slice and cut numbers the way they want to prove a point.
As I said in another comment, it's a theory that could fit the data but you are encouraged to propose other theories.
> This need of creating an enemy and the constant threat to solidify a heavy power that goes beyond any limits is in itself a threat. Even more now that a this power is being shared among those who can keep eyes and ears on you and your ears and eyes out of the real problems.
This I can fully agree on; and it is indeed the main threat that faces the West in my view. The other issues are distractions. Same now in the UK where immigration is blamed for problems (which I'm not saying there are no problems), but then the government proposes a digital ID as a solution. An extreme skeptic could at this point even argue that it seems like the problem was created on purpose to then "fix" it by draconian measures. I mean at what point do you move from incompetence to malice?
I was wondering if my comment seemed like accusing of being of ill intent. I hope not, if it does I'm sorry about that. I just meant the way it is presented it is a long stretch to conclude B from A. I am sure it happened, but I think this generalization sounds bad at a moment where people are being put against people for the sake of the show.
I do believe the system might be eventually abused in individual cases but I do not think it is mostly abused. US had taken lots of resource that would be otherwise competition if abroad and also have them generating revenue, taxes and economy flow in their own territory. It is not like US hasn't benefited of them at all. US is not depending on immigrants. They are just convenient.
In the UK, the situation is different. The skill is not there, the economy will not support another cost hike. Do not get me wrong, British people are brilliant. But the brilliant ones are already working. The younger generation is sadly unprepared and unsupported. I honestly think that if rules changes and immigrants leave UK in such hasty manner it will be as bad as the BREXIT was but the effects will come much sooner.
My company had positions with high grade pay opened in the UK for a year. No single british candidate was close to be approved. The position was closed in the UK and opened on Asia.
If this immigration laws changes I am dead right most of the foreigner engineers will leave (as intended). For others it will mean that our office will be closed. There are zero expectations on hiring enough people in the UK on time to replace people.
There is zero reasons for contributing to NI, NHS, etc for 10 years with the risks of never being able to be a citizen.
I can easily see myself in the same 'boat', pun intended. Renting in UK is absurd. Expensive, no guarantees, abusive landlords everywhere. You cannot invest your money to protect against inflation, you cannot buy a car, you cannot buy a house. You life is stagnant for 10 years with the fear of needing to leave the country in 7 weeks if you loose your job.
People do not realise that the government will be forced to cut benefits from people to make them back to work to replace the missing workforce. Even if companies pay more for native workers, things will need to get more expensive.
I see that people thinks there are millions of people in the country hence they could claim back millions of jobs by simply kicking out people. But that will not happen. Same thing with the empty promises of the Brexit. Not a single penny was saved for the NHS. If anything, just caused everything else to be more expensive or unaccessible. Which is not a surprise as the both ideas comes from exactly the same couple of guys.
I have visited a hospital in the UK recenlyy and I would be scared if suddenly all the base workforce, which are currently immigrants, are gone. People underestimate the importance of base care workers in the maintainability of a hospital. I cannot see Tesco, Asda or anything there paying double for the cashier or the store manager but only them installing cameras everywhere with their automatic checkout tills.
I am not sure why people are so easily falling for this fallacy of immigration is the problem when it is actually the incapability of creating jobs and the lack of qualified professionals. Even if it momentaneously fixed the situation, which it will not, it would not solve any of the underlying problems.
All that has being done was to go after critics, skip the laws distract people with hate speech to point them to the wrong direction.
Well to keep salaries high, productivity will have to be increased, is that a surprise?
If productivity was a problem, why accept paying less for a less capable worker? Same thing as for counterfeiting/cheap china products. They are good enough for the price. Increasing productivity does mean doing more, but doing more with less. Sadly American people already accepts being exploited by having no rights, no benefits and no work life balance (in many cases). The only thing that can get worse is to get less money.
But to be honest, I don't think people will get less money. This is politically hard to explain. Things will get more expensive.
>>People will need to accept to earn much less than they expected
Or, perhaps, the executives and shareholders who have been primarily engineering how to take an ever-growing share of the pie to the degree they can accept to earn much less than expected
With CEO pay ratios growing from 25:1 to 400:1 in the past 60 years [0], that level of extraction is not producing any useful increase in output or value; it is simply one group skimming off the others.
[0] https://ceoworld.biz/2025/09/28/the-evolution-of-ceo-pay-dat...
There is zero chance of this happening.
All the big billionaires and trillionaries CEOs were sitting with the president in his first day. There is zero chance they will have their slice of their pie smaller.
In the history of the world, there wasn't a single powerful person who accepted to share with commoners. There is not a single reason to believe it will change now.
In fact, of you read the so called big bogus bill with criticism you will see that the only group of people that are unaffected by it are they.
Of course they won't accept it spontaneously.
The issue would need to be forced, just as with any time common people force a regime to relinquish power.
Masses are weak and dumb. It is the law of averages. If split apart because of minor factors such as a race, genre and etc, the forces cancels out and no one works together. Can you think in a modern type of media that exactly does that?
It takes to much effort to get people out of inertia. Powerful people, au contrarie, work together. They same places, same parties, have same connections, their kids go to the same schools. They might compete, but they defend the same gray areas in politics, law and etc.
Gray areas are there because that's what put apart rich people from poor people. "How expensive is your lawyer" defines how much you can abuse the system.
Exactly right on every point. And they won't willingly change.
And absolutely, the metaphor is absolutely right where the table is set with one brown person with one cookie, a white person with two cookies, and the oligarch with a pile of hundreds of cookies, and the oligarch is telling the white guy to watch out because the brown guy will steal his cookies. And the stupid white guy believes it.
That said, when even a small portion of the people actually unite and demand change, things change. We have the USA itself (as opposed to British colonies), India, Pakistan, No French kings, etc., no slavery, women's voting, 40-hour work week, minimum wage, social security, lunch breaks, and more all because people united sufficiently to force change.
There is the 3.5% rule [0], validated scientifically [1], showing it takes only 3.5% of a population to force serious change in a society.
There are also situations where a rich person with power wakes up and does good things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one such person, tagged "a traitor to his class", but he implemented huge changes in favor of ordinary people.
If you are pointing out the obstacles, we agree. If you are saying it is impossible because the rich tend to stick together, that is counter to history, and if the US people fail to respond to the latest assault from the oligarchs, they'll go down in history as the greatest losers ever.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...
[1] https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/success-nonviol...
Considering this blog post author has a whole post talking about how Charlie Kirk had a blood pack under his shirt and the assassination was faked, really makes it difficult to pay attention to anything else they wrote.
yes also this video by techbutmakeitreal talks about this in great detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBX1YmJL0dw
There is a national cap on the H-1B visas that is hit every single year. Therefore it is very hard to make the case that recent layoffs are being offset by some new surge in H-1Bs.
If you want to do your own local fact checking, check out http://www.h1bdata.info .
Are h1b workers really cheaper? Don't you have to pay them similar to what an American at the same level would be paid?
As I understand it, a benefit of H-1B visa's employees is that they are more incentivized to not talk back since they would not only lose their job but also lose their visa.
I've heard a similar thing with student houses in the Netherlands. House owners often prefer international female students because they are less likely to know their rights or come up for their rights.
yes, despite lots of anecdotes of them being paid more or similar. glassdoor has an article saying they're paid higher but their methodology is crap - it doesn't account for the size of the employer (which tend to be much larger on average if they're hiring lots of h1b, and also pay higher) and that h1b workers are likely later in career than entry level. also glassdoor's customers are companies, so of course they're going to toe the line.
a better source is Economic Policy Institute, which is associated with left-wing people and so therefore presumably not being anti-immigrant, says:
"DOL lets H-1B employers undercut local wages. Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation."
https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
and also supports my earlier claim too:
"top 30 H-1B employers accounted for more than one in four of all 389,000 H-1B petitions"
link has lots of other pretty damning evidence.
i think the simplest argument is:
1. these companies have verifiably illegally engaged in wage suppression through gentlemen's agreements between CEOs (including apple/meta/google)
2. companies try as hard as possible to pay their employees as low as possible
3. why in the world would they hire h1bs that cost more when the two points above are true
4. ???
5. profit
This is bad data analysis. It has all kind of issues: using correlation to imply causation without any proposed causal mechanism; various selection bias; no context given for how the companies analyzed were selected; laughably large ranges for data points; etc.
One of the worst parts, in my opinion, is how the author misunderstands the meaning of "Actually Indians," which is about the data labeling workforce, not the white collar technical workforce.
You know it’s poor analysis when supporting evidence is, “Just look at what people are saying on Blind and this one HN comment”
I found myself holding some critical feedback back recently of a poor management decision due to caution about my career. My co-worker, who is more matured in his career, with less need for caution, instead took up my complaints (a viewpoint he shared).
I imagined how profoundly impossible it would have been for someone on an H1B visa to do this whose immigration status is contingent on their employment. Scary.
> American employees are being replaced by cheaper H-1B visa workers.
Ok someone explain to me exactly how they do that, because when I looked into working in America H-1B is a lottery (with 30% win rate) and it only happens once per year.
How exactly do these companies hire people with those constraints?
I always thought a layoff/redundancy meant that not only does the employee loose their position, but the very position itself is eliminated.
Which means if the company hires a replacement for the same position including through a sponsored visa, then it's not a genuine layoff.
Nonetheless, I'm of the opinion that no single software engineer has yet lost their job to AI. It's simply not there yet.
100% agree. No direct developer job losses from AI. But if it makes you more efficient, there are indirect job losses. Still borderline as to how much nett efficiency it provides. I needed unit-tests pronto, it saved my bacon in crunch time. But then in scaffolding some code in a system I don't know, it's been nothing but trial and error, mostly error.
>There's a reason why 'AI = Actually Indians' is a meme everywhere on the internet, and it isn't racism, it's just people observing the reality around them."
Both can be true. The Indian takeover of tech probably also fuels racism.
they fire engineer that have high experience + salary and replace them with engineer that accept lower salary
My former employer, a consulting company, just bought out a small dev consulting firm in...wait for it...Guatemala! Yes, Guatemala. Because as you all well know, Guatemala has such a long and cherished history of providing skilled software developers to the world. Oh, oh, wait, no, sorry, it's because they're really, really cheap. The main advantage of Guatemala over India is the time zone, that's it. And $5/hr or whatever those chumps are getting. I don't even think Guatemala has electricity 24/7 in most parts of the country.
It's all over for American tech dominance. MBAs sold us all out.
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