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Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

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Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#91
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You realize that no more than a third of the people in the country actually voted for said president?

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#92

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…

> 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.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#93
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#95
post #94

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.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#96
post #94

Are h1b workers really cheaper? Don't you have to pay them similar to what an American at the same level would be paid?

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

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 India…

The US is getting outcompeted by India, basically.

On short term price.

Re: Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

#99
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.

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