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.
Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
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Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#82Why 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.
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.
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#84I’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.
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at who you elected (twice!!) I don't know how wrong they are.
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?
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#87This 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…
You know it’s poor analysis when supporting evidence is, “Just look at what people are saying on Blind and this one HN comment”
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#88You 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.
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…
> 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-...
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#89How 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…
Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?
#90The 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.
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.