31–40 of 186 posts
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.
You are not providing a counterargument apart from the fact that "you don't see". Well. Thanks for sharing I guess.
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.
Corporate America really thinks we are that stupid
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 competitiv…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Both can be true. The Indian takeover of tech probably also fuels racism.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 competitiv…
Go ahead and hire exclusively cheap foreign engineers. See where it gets you.
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.
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.
Corporate America really thinks we are that stupid
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 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 s…
> 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…
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.