We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap.
And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can.
Well yeah. I went to a world-class research university in Latam. The brightest kids were making using of internships to Google, Microsoft and Meta a couple years before graduating and by then they already had a career path laid out for them in the Bay Area.
I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.
> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is.
LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
For the first time I've been hearing "this job is only available for US citizens and permanent residents" in recruiter reachouts, and these are for jobs that don't need anything like a security clearance. It's surprising because a TN status (my current status) is trivially easy to get.
Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas.
I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent.
This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here.
It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.
I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
- Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason)
- Outsource, offshore, automate, etc
- Margins and revenue go up
- Two to Three Years go by
- Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor
- Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored
- Executives parachute out successfully
- New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive
- Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country
- Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit
- Leader parachutes out successfully
- New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time
The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections).
None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way.
Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.
I guess I'm earning my grey hairs in my beard, because everything old is new again. Today AI/outsourcing is Offshoring 2.0.
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
16 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 45.9 ms ] threadAnd no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...
[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
India needs more entrepreneurs.
I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.
LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent.
This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here.
It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
- Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason)
- Outsource, offshore, automate, etc
- Margins and revenue go up
- Two to Three Years go by
- Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor
- Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored
- Executives parachute out successfully
- New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive
- Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country
- Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit
- Leader parachutes out successfully
- New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time
The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections).
None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way.
Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
[laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20...
[pushed offshore]:
- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...
- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...
[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...
[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...
[collapsed]:
- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...
- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...
- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...
[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10...