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.
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.
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.
Thomson Reuters has a beautiful campus somewhere in India while they closed down the main office in the US and sold the land. The once-thriving tech campus in the US is no more.
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.
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.
>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.
- 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
36 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadThis practice hurts all state side workers, citizen and h-1b alike.
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.
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.
If anything the biggest H1B user - amazon - seems to have done negligible layoffs.
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.
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.
Both can be true. The Indian takeover of tech probably also fuels racism.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.