There are H1B armies of regular people, doing regular jobs, that require no critical skills, making decent wages, at the cost of the American worker/Graduate. Thank your Gov for allowing corporations to fill their ranks with slave labor. It all starts with a particular kind of CEO, CIO/CTO and it guts the technology department of American employees.
Then let them. If they want to offshore, let them have the associated pros and cons, and free up real estate that American workers can use to start competitors.
They've been offshoring as much as they can for decades. The H1-B program hasn't stopped it and if it were eliminated there wouldn't be a huge surge in offshoring. Many companies have already hit the limit on offshoring and had to pull things back onshore.
>"There are H1B armies of regular people, doing regular jobs, that require no critical skills, making decent wages, at the cost of the American worker/Graduate."
Is this not just a variant of "dey took er jerbs"?
>"It all starts with a particular kind of CEO, CIO/CTO and it guts the technology department of American employees."
Wages aren't the primary determination of slave labor, it's control. I suppose "indentured servant" would be even better, but there are an enormous number of restrictions on H1B holders in how they move (both between employers and countries).
(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)
Random refugees coming into the country "takin my jerb" isn't happening. Large companies importing skilled labor for specific positions to either drive down sector wages or acquire workers who are more willing to put up with bad working conditions (this is nursing right now) is a different beast.
Thats not what the issue is, it's that they aren't free to job-hop in the way that other people are. H1B keeps their wages artificially depressed and they have a sword of damocles over their heads threatening deportation.
They just have to go to any large corporate campus and take a good look. I know of a particular one in TX where 90% of the IT employees are of one particular nationality and at least 90 % of that group do not have any kind of permanent status in the USA. I am not talking about 100-200 employees, I'm talking about 1000 plus.
There is nothing "weak" about standing up for your own economic interests. The H1B program has largely been based on a fiction--using a handful of superstars as marketing cover for tens of thousands of mid-skill developers. But with AI now coming for everyone's job the pretext of a "skills shortage" is unsustainable.
Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.
All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.
(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)
Immigration implicates economic and cultural issues, trying to reframe them as being about "hate" or "fear" is just a form of misdirection. Similarly, dismissing the concerns as "short sighted" is just ignorant of history. Plato was thinking about the challenges of reconciling immigration with democracy 2,000 years ago. Alexander Hamilton presaged the destabilizing effects of immigration on democracy at the inception of the U.S. https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2016/12/21/hamiltons-actual-vie...
> When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.
Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?
It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1
> nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?
A member of my wife's family is Swedish American. Her Swedish identity is superficial, a historical curiosity. Swedish Americans aren't glued together in any meaningful way by a common identity, they don't seek each other out to live near each other. Nor can you influence them by appealing to their Swedish heritage. By contrast, I have on multiple occasions gotten comped meals from hotel workers based on being Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis in the US and Canada feel real affinity for each other--they live in Bangladeshi neighborhoods, marry within their communities, etc. And you can influence them by appealing to their shared identity.
Irish identity is largely superficial today, but for a century it wasn't. They lived in Irish enclaves, they did favors for each other based on shared identity, and they organized politically based on ethnic background, not ideology or issues. And that had real social and political consequences for the country for a long time.
Indeed, Americans underestimate how different Irish and Swedish Americans really are from Anglo Americans even today. Americans descended from different European countries remain quite different in fundamental attitudes (e.g. social trust, views towards saving, etc). And they still vote quite differently as a result. It's also obvious just going around America. As a foreigner, it's blatantly obvious which parts of the country was settled by Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, different kinds of British, etc.
I think this is largely a function of when those waves of immigration happened, and how long ago it was. In another hundred years we'll see the Bangladeshi-American descendants having a fully superficial, historical curiosity type of connection to their heritage, like you describe for the Swedish-Americans. It just takes a few generations.
I don't think that's what's happening here. It's pretty clear importing thousands (10s of thousands?) people into an area has an effect on the local residents that's not good.
I think that's their point - the subjects of the article should be working instead of hiking. But someone with an H1B visa, yet lacking any special skills, has a job instead of them.
I don't agree with their premise, just restating it.
The old myth of "immigrants are taking our jobs". The American economy (and all western countries) would be substantially weaker without all those immigrants, highly skilled or not. Without them, the agricultural sector would collapse, the health care system would barely hang by a thread, and next time you go use a toilet at your companies office or a random shopping mall, try to find out who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).
Immigrants grow the economy, if anything. They make your life better.
That I even have to read this nonsense in a place with so smart and highly educated people as HN makes me pretty sad.
>who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).
If there was no immigrant willing to do it for a bare minimum wage, the mall would have to pay a local more to keep it clean. If there was no immigrant to work on farms for the bare minimum, farmers would have to pay locals a decent wage to make them do the same work. There's no such thing as a worker shortage, only wages that are too low to attract workers.
Employers have tried this and there is no possible wage that satisfies the supply/demand curve and doesn't use immigrant labor for some jobs. Not sure about cleaning mall bathrooms, but this has already been demonstrated for many crops: strawberries will rot in fields rather than American-born workers picking them, for any price.
When the "economy" grows, that doesn't make my life better. My life gets better when I can command a higher salary for my labor, something I can't do when companies are allowed to flood the market with low cost foreign labor. This is so obvious I don't understand how supporters can be so smug and wrong at the same time.
First of all, that's not the problem. AI companies are eating up so much of the economy and supply chain that your game console -- whatever it is -- now costs another $200. Crypto at least kept this limited to GPUs. They're also openly advertising on billboards that say things like "AI won't ask for a raise."
Second -- as much as abuse of this program does happen, the problem is that they aren't decent wages or working conditions.
The only requirements of this program are that you're not paying less to a local employee -- which functionally means you can pay the same substandard wages to everyone, and then go to the government saying "we can't find qualified talent in our area." Much like a minimum wage employer with a "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" sign, at a certain point it's actually that no one wants to work for you... but we don't put strong enough requirements in place for that it to function more effectively as a way of filling talent shortages and less as a welfare system for the worst employers in your area.
The solution to this isn't broad crackdowns, or obviously hostile nonsense like that $100k fee. It's actually better labor protections -- longer grace periods so that you can leave an abusive employer, market rate pay, reasonable limits on overtime, and more scrutiny around other violations of stateside labor protections. The problem isn't that specialized fields like tech still need visas to some extent, to attract talent at their hiring bar. It's that there's no validation that these are reasonable jobs that a reasonable person would accept. It's that we shouldn't prop up companies that can't hire on their own merits, or enable large scale market manipulation to every part of our working conditions -- by giving them to companies that are 996ing, or that violate labor protections, or that openly talk about how you won't be happy there if you value pay. Those things harm everyone, and lower our labor standards across the entire industry.
The problem across both is actually the same -- businesses that want to take shortcuts to get employees (real or otherwise) that won't ask for raises, speak up about their other working conditions, or leave for something better.
Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live. I understand that some people have an emotional or family attachment to it but honestly most of them would be way better off in the long run if they just moved. We can debate all sorts of hypothetical government policy changes that would make the city more livable and affordable, but come on, realistically most of those aren't ever going to happen. At some point you have to accept reality.
It used to not be like this. As a tech worker, i can say objectively that tech workers ruined SF. Rent was more expensive than South Bay but only by a couple of hundred dollars per month. In 2005 I paid $1700/month for a rent-controlled 700 sqft 1 bedroom in near Noe Valley. I later moved into another rent-controlled 500 sq ft studio on Twin Peaks with a view of the Bay for $1200/month in 2008.
I had friends who were artists and graphic designers that lived in a 2-floor 4 bedroom apartment in Noe Valley with incredible views of the Bay. They were paying $3200/month combined, so $800/month each.
That time was probably one of the best in my life. There was always something to do in SF, we would go out every weekend, go to bars, clubs. Golden Gate park for sports, free outdoor concerts like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I saw Robin Williams perform comedy one year for free and most importantly it wasn't crowded. People didn't think that their social media life depended on them going to an event or a restaurant and posting about it.
It started getting worse because of the 7x7 list and lines grew longer because people wanted to follow that list like sheep. Then more and more tech workers drove up the prices until all my friends that I used to hang out with moved out of SF to other parts of the country. DC, LA, Denver. All their apartments got replaced by tech workers. SF is now a mono-culture and pretty destroyed if you ask me. Everything is overcrowded, unaffordable and overhyped. It's a real disappointment to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world rot from the inside.
Where’s those other highly walkable cities (by American standards) with great running weather, plentiful amazing views, and diverse restaurants and activities?
I was in the Bay Area for almost 2 decades. I’m familiar with this mindset. There are so many compromises you make living in the Bay Area … like any other location.
More traffic, fewer families, faster pace of life, etc.
Well keep in mind this thread is in the context of the top level comment being “Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live”
So yes I compromise on apartment/house size because I value walkability, local activity density, and year round running. Guess that makes me part of the “very narrow demographic” in USA.
> walkability, local activity density, and year round running
The fact that you think SF is the only city in America with these three things and the flippant, sarcastic "guess that makes me part of the very narrow demographic" quip tells me you aren't really approaching this discussion with an open mind.
No city on the planet is perfect. You are making tradeoffs by living where you do, same as I do living where I am.
Why does this idea seem like a personal attack to you? Every single reply you've made in this thread has the subtext "no, nope, not my experience, you're wrong".
Again, you like SF. That's great! It's not for everyone. That's not an assault on your personage.
Maybe the reaction is more: what has all of that and as dense a job market (at least for the time being)? Or just a reaction, like I had, calling it a 'shitty place to live'. I'm more than happy for folks to discover other locales and lower the rent but even as a fan of SF, I don't see those smaller cities as fungible unless you've got enough saved to retire, in which case, fair enough.
I mean this whole thread started with a top level comment declaring “Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live”
That’s a very broad over the top edict, if you don’t like people defending a place maybe it’s best to try to stop the person lighting it on fire?
Seems backward to object to a person essentially saying “it’s actually pretty great if you like XYZ, like many do”
the things that people mention as compromises - expensive for families, traffic, small living space - aren't things that are make or break for me. i don't plan to have kids, bypass traffic on my bike, have the city as my living room, rent is relatively less of a burden because my remaining spend revolves around food.
I would agree with you, until I asked someone who lived there how it is that people working normal jobs like Bartenders can afford to live anywhere in SF.
I was told that there are rent-subsidy programs that allow people making relatively low wages to pay e.g. $300-800/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment
My thought after hearing that is that, unless you're making north of $300-400k, it's probably better to make around $50-60k and collect subsidies + benefits. The middle income group gets shafted.
Why live somewhere and be dependent on subsidies if you can move and be independent?
I lived in the Bay Area for 17 years. Enjoyed the time but it’s “for a season”. It’s common for folks in the Bay Area to look at other locations as “lesser”. In reality, it’s about tradeoffs.
For those low wage earners, you're not going to get a large deal of independence by doing the job in Des Moines compared to San Francisco. You'll still be scraping by, possibly saving a little bit but not much.
It depends on what you mean by "low wage earners". You can own a home and save money in virtually all of the United States as a teacher or someone doing anything in tech. You could also be a single income family if one partner makes $150k.
"A group of more than four dozen laid-off workers gathered at 11 a.m. on a Monday to hike Mount Tamalpais, a majestic peak overlooking the San Francisco Bay. They descended the mostly deserted trail in groups of about a dozen, led by Basem Istanbouli, a former Google employee sporting a bucket hat and a pair of toe shoes."
I'd rather hike than sling JavaScript, but that's just me.
I’m not sure why the fact they formerly had FAANG jobs means they’re unworthy of sympathy for being laid off or why it means that they must be financially secure for life. We can sympathize with them and with other people that are even worse off, it’s not a zero sum game.
EDIT: Downvotes incoming so I am blocked out of responding to comments for 8h.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive places on earth. $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family. Dual income becomes pretty much mandatory and if one of those incomes are lost, things start to get tough.
Pretty much anywhere else in the US (outside some parts of the East coast) and almost anywhere in the world, $180k/yr is an amazing salary.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not).
"AI" has, and will, suck out capital out of the market - this, coupled with non-zero interest rates is putting companies under pressure where cost savings is the top, if not one of the top priorities.
So these two conversations are happening in every board and executive room in San Francisco:
- SMB/startups: Can we go faster with less people if we load up on tokens? Yes.
- MNCs/Large Orgs: Are our engineers out of Austin or Asia equally productive with AI assistance? Yes.
So the decision is simple: San Francisco's expensive engineers and tech workers are useful in a rapidly contracting niche. They are still valuable for startups based out of SF (but the startups are just hiring less than they used to). They are still valuable for rapidly expanding companies based out of SF that are not yet having the cost discussion - Anthropic and OpenAI are certainly hiring.
But rest of the companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced.
That said, AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business. I certainly have been encouraging people to find their own customers before their (ex)employer forces them to.
Yeah, seems like if you're living in a boom area you would be there for as long as you personally are booming. I think big city areas in general are expensive to live in. There's a LOT of space in the world where decent savings in boom area would cover you for most or all of your life. And the more people who are in boom areas, the more expensive it is to live there. So of course it makes sense that the dude at the top of the article is "jobless" as if he is... ?
Sure, but let’s not forget that ~90% of the Bay Area does not work in tech. They are all being left out of the AI boom, similar to how they were left out of every tech boom before it. Don’t see why we need to weep for these ex-FAANG engineers specifically.
A lot of it is local politics too. The Bay Area has chosen very hostile to economic growth policies especially around zoning/ affordable housing etc.
So it’s like if they keep voting for people who are anti growth it seems like the expected outcome to be left out. I.e. if new apartment buildings are largely banned, you don’t get the opportunity to open a coffee shop or work as a building manager.
These layoffs are happening because the entire tech industry is sinking all of its free cash into AI capex. H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs. If you’re blaming immigrants for this, you are either doing so in bad faith, or you are embarrassingly gullible.
> H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs
I agree that the H1B train is a red herring but I explained in my comment how AI has enabled mediocre talent to become more effective. Effective enough where they are "good enough" for what most companies need.
One of the reasons why offshoring was difficult was that asynchronous work wasn't the normal, so what a lot of companies would do is give the uninteresting pieces to the offshored teams.
That's taken a 180 in 2026. Google, OpenAI, Meta are building core infrastructure and software out of India. They don't even have to pay H1B rates.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working, expedited post COVID but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not). All asynchronously.
These two factors have come together where the average tech worker out of SF is not longer very valuable - companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper, assisted by token spend.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced
We also got laid off en masse. Well, I wasn't (for now), but several of my friends were months ago already and I'm not seeing them coming back anytime soon.
Laying off people is such an easy thing to do that no matter the region of the world, it's being done.
It seems like companies are laying off en masse everywhere while also hiring en masse in low COL countries. A few of the major corps HQed in my city have announced massive layoffs at the corporate office while relocating the jobs to a new "remote" HQ in India.
I've seen this enough to know where it goes - companies will move mid level jobs offshore, then relocate their "HQ" from a cheap midwestern city to an expensive one, NYC, Austin, LA, etc. Basically, the executives want to live somewhere expensive and cosmopolitan but they don't want to pay normal workers enough to live in those locations.
I think what you're seeing is change for the sake of change. You're friends will probably find jobs as "AI Engineers" at another company who just did a massive round of layoffs.
This seems like a complete opposite of what you'd expect. Why hire a team of mediocre overseas workers to prompt Claude (your characterization), then have to talk to them only at weird times of day, and have a 12 hour turnaround on anything, when you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?
> swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?
At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.
The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.
So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.
>Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?
Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have significant customer engineering: architecture, integrations, evaluations, and production deployments in India. It's kept under wraps because the current administration doesn't want their "We need to win AI" to be overshadowed by "but our money is going to India again!" concerns with voters.
The U.S. is having its midterms - it closes tomorrow - and the next two years are pivotal to who wins the senate for the next 4 years. Having it leaked that billions of dollars of domestic AI spend is going to India is going to sink the GOP.
OpenAI has large offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Anthropic is rapidly expanding their Bengaluru office to Mumbai.
India is an extremely large market - there are 4x more people in India than in the U.S, so it's a huge TAM but most of them don't read or speak English so there's a tremendous localization challenge.
India is undergoing a fundamental shift in their economy. They used to be a culture that used to save money before they spend it. Recently I saw a large group of Indian visitors by the Golden Bridge taking pictures and asked them how they could have afforded to save for the trip given the current explosion in prices.
They hadn't saved money - they had taken out loans for the trip. Everyone of them. Apparently their house help earns as much as a teacher in Nonalva, Mumbai (I might have got the city wrong but it sounded like that)
They also focus their students on STEM and are having a tech. hiring crisis (so talent is really cheap). Every engineer speaks atleast 3 different languages, including English and even more local dialects.
Adjusted for cost, the above average Indian engineer assisted by Claude is insanely more valuable than an average engineer from SF assisted by Claude. It's like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs your average US frontier model.
As I said in another comment, $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.
Every market has an upper threshold of costs parties are willing to bear and San Francisco passed it where there's now active demand collapse. Companies are voting with their wallets and people in San Francisco are paying the price.
I am very aware, being indian myself, and have broad knowledge of the tech ecosystem here. Openai/anthropic in india is mostly sales. There is not yet research/engineering roles beyond that.
> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.
Irrelevant, but just for information, you could provided you're willing to live in a relatively rural area.
> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.
I don’t know what you picture when you think of India but a median 3 bedroom apartment in Mumbai costs about $400k and in Bangalore it’s $200K. And these won’t be the desirable neighborhoods nor newer apartments. After taxes on $180K after 2-3 years, you’d mostly be able to afford a tiny rented apartment for a few years but that’s it.
I don't know how old you are, but if you were around in the early 2000's there was a BIG offshore fear. More and more they were hiring in India and the Philippines and other places. Initially it was the NOC / L1, maybe L2, and in certain areas.
Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.
Now, what has changed? Don't tell me Claude. As far as I can tell, these folks make a lot less, and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed. Culturally, you have to often tell them very explicitly what to do and it is not normal to think outside of the box. I doubt that has changed.
So why would we be more afraid than we were in the early 2000's?
And even if delegating thinking to the offshore worker to delegate thinking to Claude ... why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?
I remember that era. I call AI today Offshoring 2.0 and put up some citations [0]. I remember how it cratered the CS/hiring pipeline for a decade, leading to the competitive frenzy during ZIRP.
>Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.
>Now, what has changed?
We did.
The sorts of strongly hierarchical/rank based and "follow the process to our obvious demise" type workplace culture that is normal in big companies in the US today would be the punchline of a derisive joke about government/union/academic employment in 2006. Back then there was a HUGE culture gulf between an office in the US and an office in Bangalore or Manila because they ran that way but the office in SF or Redmond or whatever didn't. But in the past 20yr there has been a push to treat people (more than we already did) as replaceable cogs, do everything by committee, divy up responsibility, escalate everything, follow the process when the process and the big picture conflict because it's "not your station" to think about those things, etc, etc.
You can blame it on academia and MBA schools, you can blame it on the culture that we imported with the H1Bs, you can blame it on regulatory posture fanning the flames of all this, IDK, I tend to blame them all. But it absolutely happened. And now that we've incurred the cost of running that way just by virtue of our workplace culture changing there's a lot less operational cost to onboarding an offshore team.
I'm not sure I'd apply "good" as a modifier. Being generous, maybe "mediocre."
Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job.
I have a feeling that LLMs are going to drastically improve the baseline quality of software. The top end will always require exceptional human involvement, but it will look different.
I disagree. As a manager you're better off accepting a little lower level of productivity from your best employees if it means you don't have embarrassing, to higher management but also to customers, lapses in productivity.
It’s been my experience, that humans; even ones that share much in common, have many different drivers, strengths, and limitations.
Culture also plays a big role. The US has a culture that encourages individual expression, and that’s one of our strengths (and limitations).
I spent many years, working for a Japanese company, and their culture is a much better environment for “one size fits all.” In their case, it actually became a huge strength, but their approach would not work in the US.
> Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job
To use a food analogy; this approach may works very well for a boutique upscale food joint chasing Michelin stars. This doesn't scale to the size of, say, McDonald's. At that stage, variability and creativity are a negative, and guardrails are good. You want literate warm-bodies that can follow well-established procedures step by step. When your engineering staff complement grows over 50,000 - it may get difficult to find (and retain) those who are "exceptional".
It's not just about scale either, if you're a content, sole-proprietor hole-in the wall operation, (expensive) exceptional people aren't going to move the needle,and may even be detrimental to your viability.
If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money
The talent pool in India has always trended towards mediocre. Highly skilled candidates do exist of course, but in a sea of diploma mill graduates they are extremely hard to find.
Companies have decided now that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.
Basically this, and it will get extremely worse. These regions will greatly benefit in the near term.
However, the mediocre India talent pool shouldn't be expected to drive Claude very well. The impact to companies will be devastating once they realize that in about 6-12 months when they finally realize they have to deal with the piles of garbage that were created.
Previous decades didn't do remotely work as well as we are now. Also South America is a cheap option now. Language is less of an issue and more culturaly similar to the us
Off-shoring has definitely been a factor in layoffs over the past few years. It came back pretty strong around 2023-2025. I agree that any new cuts will likely be due to AI. Hiring has more or less ground to a halt regardless of location now.
You could (and should) have made this point without the personal attacks. Something like "if you're blaming immigrants for this, you are greatly mistaken".
Why pussy foot around hurting the feeling of ignorant gullible racist xenophobic sacks of shit? I thought MAGA cult members loved it when people say what they're really thinking no matter whose feelings get hurt, instead of being so politically correct. Who's the sensitive snowflake now?
There’s a lot to unpack about this, from this is being result of capitalism (or hyper capitalism in US) and not AI, all the way to this would not have had happened if software or tech people were “street smarts” rather than just logical smart, they basically shot themselves in the foot, they went crazy on automating their own work to the point when the boss saw the work is too automated to need them, they got fired, meanwhile if you look at other sectors (healthcare, education, legal, etc.) they immediately lobbied to prevent such case, they allowed the use of AI but they are still the gate keeper of it: “oh you need to use AI in a healthcare matter?! Nope, can’t do that without a licensed practitioner!!” It’s simply to make sure they are not going to be jobless within 5y.
Solutions? Well, it varies from how invested you are to solve it, are you open to tame capitalism and dismantling the concept of infinite growth and minimizing expenses while maximizing profits? Or are you open to regulate the tech market just like other sectors, and mandating a human gatekeepers regardless of how smart the AI is? There are many solutions but I highly doubt any will be done in the current political atmosphere.
> Now he’s parsing job titles like “AI strategist” and “AI engineer,”
I have seen things like this. They often just look like backend swe jobs though? Are people getting these kinds of titles without masters in ML? Or pivoting somehow?
> Now, one of the most popular jobs in tech may be forward deployed engineers,
Experienced devs have been through several loops of this process. Regardless of the theory behind each word, in practice it's just code words to prove you're part of the in group and updated.
In the past you might have been asked to add to the CV that you're into devops when you're just expected to trigger deploy jobs, or to explain that you take data-driven decisions when you're just adding some metrics to a powerpoint to justify a move that would have been done anyway, or to define yourself as a product engineer when they just want you to give a crap about users and be able to interface normally with managers.
Now there's a lot of "forward deployed engineers" that are actually just consultants or people interfacing with third parties, or AI-native devs that are just a guy using claude and maybe touching a couple mds.
This is not to say that significant changes aren't coming to the field, but the job application buzzword game is business as usual.
This is not the experience I have with the SF tech scene. I moved to Canada from SF to raise a kid and even now have a lot of startups offering jobs on a TN visa or similar. There are days when I feel like taking the offer as the Canadian tech scene and opportunities are non existent.
Ya it's admittedly pretty rough here in Canada, at least on the west coast. At least it's beautiful, less toxic, free healthcare, better protections for rights. The single legit invitation to interview I've received was for some SF bs startup that was heavily emphasizing being AI first in every aspect, constant pivoting, calls, unclear what the actual product was but it reeked like garbage.
If it weren't for healthcare, despite the lack of income for presumably the next year, I assume I'd be screwed.
Just remember that Silicon Valley started when a few tech founders moved from New Jersey to California and created an ecosystem. LA movie industry was the same. Both industries were in New Jersey. Lesson is to create a scene.
And SF tech workers don't even have a hukou that gives them the right to go back to their village.
China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.
> you live in the best time to exist in history. Stop complaining. Imagine how bad it would be if you were a poor peasant farmer like all those people before you
> We don't need you anymore. Have you considered becoming a poor peasant farmer?
Isn't farming mostly automated anyways? I can't imagine China needs masses return to the fields for any reason other than go keep them occupied.
I applied to Anthropic a few years ago but didn’t pass the bar on their coding test. I read recently that if I had been hired in that period, my equity would be worth over 40 million based on their current valuation (and i remained employed the entire time there)
It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago i would be 100x wealthier than I am today. Whether or not you met the right bar, got into the right company at the right time is the difference between a tedious endless struggle and securing your family’s wealth for the rest of the century.
Paper wealth unless you actually sell. I know several people who were paper decamillionaires in the dot-com boom and then their equity was worth literally zero a year later.
For that matter, that could easily happen to Anthropic millionaires. There's usually a 6-month lockup on employee sales after IPO. They are hoping the stock market (and specifically Anthropic stock) does not crash in the 6 months before they can sell, and this is far from a given in a rising interest rate environment with the potential for renewed hostilities against Iran. They also to be sensible enough to take profits off the table and diversify when they can, which not everybody is.
Yeah this hits the sentiment on the head, and I think shows the psychic damage of a system sliding into extreme inequality. My friend group seems to sit along this divide, and it's hard to see the impact that this sort of rumination can have on incredibly brilliant people.
> It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago, I would be 100x wealthier than I am today.
Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy, but those experiencing it often aren't any happier than those who have their needs met. Look at any of the tech (b|tr)illionaires; do they seem as genuinely happy/content as the neighbor down the street who gardens regularly and has a tight-knit group of friends and family they spend time with?
Don't get me wrong, money is great! But the "keeping up with the joneses" never stops. You quickly adjust your mindset and feel poor compared to your buddy who has 400 million dollars.
> Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy
It’s also great to the wealthy. Speaking as someone moderately wealthy myself. Not having to worry about day to day bills, being able to splurge on friends and family for a celebration or when they have an emergency, being able to travel to see things because you read about it in a book and want to check it out, and being able to single-handed direct non-profit efforts to achieve civic outcomes you’d otherwise have to spend months or years building consensus around, all of these are tremendously rewarding. I agree that once folks get into the billionaire bucket there seems to be a negative return on wealth. But going from having to think about the mortgage to not is a major step up in quality of life.
90% of my extended family’s issues and my partners family’s issues could be resolved with 10 million dollars. Sure we would graduate to “rich people
problems”, but they don’t carry the same sting of desperation and futility
feel better man, you probably weren't in the running unless you already had an amazing resume, top-tier schools, connections, etc. They have 10,000x applicants for positions, they are probably hard filtering on harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They are very far from "we just need someone who is good enough at coding". Its more like harvard where they have 3x total open slots of people with 4.0, perfect SAT/ACT, and extra curriculars. That's why its down to "culture fit" and "gut feel" (e.g. connections).
Now if you already have those things (top-tier school, connections, world-class experience on resume), you can probably still and a cushy overpaid position somewhere, just look for somewhere else they are lighting money on fire.
God. Do they want people who did those things but also were the Class President, played a sport and has someone important write a letter?
As someone who thumbed their nose at academia being a proud self-taught techie from Old Schoolia, stuff like that makes me feel echoes of aristocracy (I do have a degree howeve). I recently interviewed a bunch of grads and picked the one who wasn't from an Ivy League - specifically because he showed tons of self-directed learning and curiosity and humility, while the others had grand plans that had absolutely nothing to do with our group function and mission. As someone who's been around a while, some of my worst work experiences were with autistic geniuses who acted proud and mean, and ended up making the environment toxic.
> As someone who thumbed their nose at academia being a proud self-taught techie from Old Schoolia, stuff like that makes me feel echoes of aristocracy
Indeed, but they birthed the god from which they derive divine right.
Kind of interesting how people feel this way. What if I said that anthropic's current valuation was dependent on a bunch of folks getting rejected? Because if you were hired, then others like you would have been hired. Would there have been as much progress or luck with many folks like you? Don't take me wrong, it's not that you are bad at what you do, it's just that you can't guarantee the same present outcome at all.
It's the same claim like bitcoin. Many would say that if they bought bitcoin, then they would've had a massive return. But the bitcoin price is the way that it is because of people not buying early. There's no guarantee that the price would've moved the same if you bought earlier.
Figured I'd just give some food for thought to hopefully make you feel better.
That assumes a static view of competence. Would I, getting into Anthropic just barely past the bar, not have upskilled significantly in such an intense environment? A company is not solely the weighted sum of its composite aptitudes, it is the culture and processes which maximally exploit and nourish those aptitudes.
Same feeling here for OpenAI. Though in my case I knew I wasn't getting it even before the interviews. The first interview was a guy who was a serial founder and the other one was previously a senior staff engineer at FAANG. And if I would’ve been hired, I’d be at the same level as them. I did okay in the interview but clearly didn’t have the experience on paper that they were looking for.
> Demand for software engineers in the Bay Area has fallen 42% since 2022, according to Lightcast, a labor-market analytics firm. Jobs tied to AI-related IT and computer science, meanwhile, have jumped 37%.
How much of this is just everything IT-related being rebranded as AI?
The dichotomy of groups who say AI is making us so efficient we don't need as many SDEs and and knowledge workers and we also need to import skilled workers and also if you don't do that then they'll just offshore those jobs so why are they onshoring them in the first place.
It's just all so contradictory and dishonest. It's an important topic to discuss because the gravy train is ending for all of us, regardless of which border you reside within, but too many people get way too emotional as soon as you bring it up.
I'd say the solution would be to move out of the Bay Area and inland, where there were always fewer jobs but also fewer people to fill them. Wages are certainly lower there but so is the cost of living.
But is the downturn due to A.I.? I doubt it. The job market was booming after COVID and companies were hiring like there was no tomorrow. Things are now settling down to sane levels and means many will lose their jobs.
Also there's a general downturn from import tariffs and higher energy prices.
Are there a lot of software jobs inland? Moving to Montana is nice from a cost of living POV but unless your goal is to become a rancher or miner, there’s not a hugely booming software engineering market.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadIs this not just a variant of "dey took er jerbs"?
>"It all starts with a particular kind of CEO, CIO/CTO and it guts the technology department of American employees."
You can just say what kind
(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)
Eg, green card
All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.
(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)
Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?
It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1
A member of my wife's family is Swedish American. Her Swedish identity is superficial, a historical curiosity. Swedish Americans aren't glued together in any meaningful way by a common identity, they don't seek each other out to live near each other. Nor can you influence them by appealing to their Swedish heritage. By contrast, I have on multiple occasions gotten comped meals from hotel workers based on being Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis in the US and Canada feel real affinity for each other--they live in Bangladeshi neighborhoods, marry within their communities, etc. And you can influence them by appealing to their shared identity.
Irish identity is largely superficial today, but for a century it wasn't. They lived in Irish enclaves, they did favors for each other based on shared identity, and they organized politically based on ethnic background, not ideology or issues. And that had real social and political consequences for the country for a long time.
Indeed, Americans underestimate how different Irish and Swedish Americans really are from Anglo Americans even today. Americans descended from different European countries remain quite different in fundamental attitudes (e.g. social trust, views towards saving, etc). And they still vote quite differently as a result. It's also obvious just going around America. As a foreigner, it's blatantly obvious which parts of the country was settled by Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, different kinds of British, etc.
I don't agree with their premise, just restating it.
The old myth of "immigrants are taking our jobs". The American economy (and all western countries) would be substantially weaker without all those immigrants, highly skilled or not. Without them, the agricultural sector would collapse, the health care system would barely hang by a thread, and next time you go use a toilet at your companies office or a random shopping mall, try to find out who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).
Immigrants grow the economy, if anything. They make your life better.
That I even have to read this nonsense in a place with so smart and highly educated people as HN makes me pretty sad.
If there was no immigrant willing to do it for a bare minimum wage, the mall would have to pay a local more to keep it clean. If there was no immigrant to work on farms for the bare minimum, farmers would have to pay locals a decent wage to make them do the same work. There's no such thing as a worker shortage, only wages that are too low to attract workers.
How many "regular" positions would be lost in a counterfactual world with less domestic demand?
Second -- as much as abuse of this program does happen, the problem is that they aren't decent wages or working conditions.
The only requirements of this program are that you're not paying less to a local employee -- which functionally means you can pay the same substandard wages to everyone, and then go to the government saying "we can't find qualified talent in our area." Much like a minimum wage employer with a "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" sign, at a certain point it's actually that no one wants to work for you... but we don't put strong enough requirements in place for that it to function more effectively as a way of filling talent shortages and less as a welfare system for the worst employers in your area.
The solution to this isn't broad crackdowns, or obviously hostile nonsense like that $100k fee. It's actually better labor protections -- longer grace periods so that you can leave an abusive employer, market rate pay, reasonable limits on overtime, and more scrutiny around other violations of stateside labor protections. The problem isn't that specialized fields like tech still need visas to some extent, to attract talent at their hiring bar. It's that there's no validation that these are reasonable jobs that a reasonable person would accept. It's that we shouldn't prop up companies that can't hire on their own merits, or enable large scale market manipulation to every part of our working conditions -- by giving them to companies that are 996ing, or that violate labor protections, or that openly talk about how you won't be happy there if you value pay. Those things harm everyone, and lower our labor standards across the entire industry.
The problem across both is actually the same -- businesses that want to take shortcuts to get employees (real or otherwise) that won't ask for raises, speak up about their other working conditions, or leave for something better.
I had friends who were artists and graphic designers that lived in a 2-floor 4 bedroom apartment in Noe Valley with incredible views of the Bay. They were paying $3200/month combined, so $800/month each.
That time was probably one of the best in my life. There was always something to do in SF, we would go out every weekend, go to bars, clubs. Golden Gate park for sports, free outdoor concerts like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I saw Robin Williams perform comedy one year for free and most importantly it wasn't crowded. People didn't think that their social media life depended on them going to an event or a restaurant and posting about it.
It started getting worse because of the 7x7 list and lines grew longer because people wanted to follow that list like sheep. Then more and more tech workers drove up the prices until all my friends that I used to hang out with moved out of SF to other parts of the country. DC, LA, Denver. All their apartments got replaced by tech workers. SF is now a mono-culture and pretty destroyed if you ask me. Everything is overcrowded, unaffordable and overhyped. It's a real disappointment to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world rot from the inside.
I’ve apparently been overlooking all of them!
No compromise needed on those points, the compromise is living in a smaller apartment, but it’s okay since now my backyard is Golden Gate Park.
More traffic, fewer families, faster pace of life, etc.
The Bay Area has its pros and cons.
So yes I compromise on apartment/house size because I value walkability, local activity density, and year round running. Guess that makes me part of the “very narrow demographic” in USA.
The fact that you think SF is the only city in America with these three things and the flippant, sarcastic "guess that makes me part of the very narrow demographic" quip tells me you aren't really approaching this discussion with an open mind.
No city on the planet is perfect. You are making tradeoffs by living where you do, same as I do living where I am.
Why does this idea seem like a personal attack to you? Every single reply you've made in this thread has the subtext "no, nope, not my experience, you're wrong".
Again, you like SF. That's great! It's not for everyone. That's not an assault on your personage.
That’s a very broad over the top edict, if you don’t like people defending a place maybe it’s best to try to stop the person lighting it on fire?
Seems backward to object to a person essentially saying “it’s actually pretty great if you like XYZ, like many do”
I was told that there are rent-subsidy programs that allow people making relatively low wages to pay e.g. $300-800/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment
My thought after hearing that is that, unless you're making north of $300-400k, it's probably better to make around $50-60k and collect subsidies + benefits. The middle income group gets shafted.
I lived in the Bay Area for 17 years. Enjoyed the time but it’s “for a season”. It’s common for folks in the Bay Area to look at other locations as “lesser”. In reality, it’s about tradeoffs.
That's a lot of independence.
I'd rather hike than sling JavaScript, but that's just me.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive places on earth. $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family. Dual income becomes pretty much mandatory and if one of those incomes are lost, things start to get tough.
Pretty much anywhere else in the US (outside some parts of the East coast) and almost anywhere in the world, $180k/yr is an amazing salary.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not).
"AI" has, and will, suck out capital out of the market - this, coupled with non-zero interest rates is putting companies under pressure where cost savings is the top, if not one of the top priorities.
So these two conversations are happening in every board and executive room in San Francisco:
- SMB/startups: Can we go faster with less people if we load up on tokens? Yes.
- MNCs/Large Orgs: Are our engineers out of Austin or Asia equally productive with AI assistance? Yes.
So the decision is simple: San Francisco's expensive engineers and tech workers are useful in a rapidly contracting niche. They are still valuable for startups based out of SF (but the startups are just hiring less than they used to). They are still valuable for rapidly expanding companies based out of SF that are not yet having the cost discussion - Anthropic and OpenAI are certainly hiring.
But rest of the companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced.
That said, AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business. I certainly have been encouraging people to find their own customers before their (ex)employer forces them to.
So it’s like if they keep voting for people who are anti growth it seems like the expected outcome to be left out. I.e. if new apartment buildings are largely banned, you don’t get the opportunity to open a coffee shop or work as a building manager.
I agree that the H1B train is a red herring but I explained in my comment how AI has enabled mediocre talent to become more effective. Effective enough where they are "good enough" for what most companies need.
One of the reasons why offshoring was difficult was that asynchronous work wasn't the normal, so what a lot of companies would do is give the uninteresting pieces to the offshored teams.
That's taken a 180 in 2026. Google, OpenAI, Meta are building core infrastructure and software out of India. They don't even have to pay H1B rates.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working, expedited post COVID but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not). All asynchronously.
These two factors have come together where the average tech worker out of SF is not longer very valuable - companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper, assisted by token spend.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced
We also got laid off en masse. Well, I wasn't (for now), but several of my friends were months ago already and I'm not seeing them coming back anytime soon.
Laying off people is such an easy thing to do that no matter the region of the world, it's being done.
I've seen this enough to know where it goes - companies will move mid level jobs offshore, then relocate their "HQ" from a cheap midwestern city to an expensive one, NYC, Austin, LA, etc. Basically, the executives want to live somewhere expensive and cosmopolitan but they don't want to pay normal workers enough to live in those locations.
I think what you're seeing is change for the sake of change. You're friends will probably find jobs as "AI Engineers" at another company who just did a massive round of layoffs.
At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.
The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.
So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.
Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.
Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.
The U.S. is having its midterms - it closes tomorrow - and the next two years are pivotal to who wins the senate for the next 4 years. Having it leaked that billions of dollars of domestic AI spend is going to India is going to sink the GOP.
OpenAI has large offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Anthropic is rapidly expanding their Bengaluru office to Mumbai.
India is an extremely large market - there are 4x more people in India than in the U.S, so it's a huge TAM but most of them don't read or speak English so there's a tremendous localization challenge.
India is undergoing a fundamental shift in their economy. They used to be a culture that used to save money before they spend it. Recently I saw a large group of Indian visitors by the Golden Bridge taking pictures and asked them how they could have afforded to save for the trip given the current explosion in prices.
They hadn't saved money - they had taken out loans for the trip. Everyone of them. Apparently their house help earns as much as a teacher in Nonalva, Mumbai (I might have got the city wrong but it sounded like that)
They also focus their students on STEM and are having a tech. hiring crisis (so talent is really cheap). Every engineer speaks atleast 3 different languages, including English and even more local dialects.
Adjusted for cost, the above average Indian engineer assisted by Claude is insanely more valuable than an average engineer from SF assisted by Claude. It's like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs your average US frontier model.
As I said in another comment, $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.
Every market has an upper threshold of costs parties are willing to bear and San Francisco passed it where there's now active demand collapse. Companies are voting with their wallets and people in San Francisco are paying the price.
> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.
Irrelevant, but just for information, you could provided you're willing to live in a relatively rural area.
I don’t know what you picture when you think of India but a median 3 bedroom apartment in Mumbai costs about $400k and in Bangalore it’s $200K. And these won’t be the desirable neighborhoods nor newer apartments. After taxes on $180K after 2-3 years, you’d mostly be able to afford a tiny rented apartment for a few years but that’s it.
Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.
Now, what has changed? Don't tell me Claude. As far as I can tell, these folks make a lot less, and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed. Culturally, you have to often tell them very explicitly what to do and it is not normal to think outside of the box. I doubt that has changed.
So why would we be more afraid than we were in the early 2000's?
And even if delegating thinking to the offshore worker to delegate thinking to Claude ... why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125477
>Now, what has changed?
We did.
The sorts of strongly hierarchical/rank based and "follow the process to our obvious demise" type workplace culture that is normal in big companies in the US today would be the punchline of a derisive joke about government/union/academic employment in 2006. Back then there was a HUGE culture gulf between an office in the US and an office in Bangalore or Manila because they ran that way but the office in SF or Redmond or whatever didn't. But in the past 20yr there has been a push to treat people (more than we already did) as replaceable cogs, do everything by committee, divy up responsibility, escalate everything, follow the process when the process and the big picture conflict because it's "not your station" to think about those things, etc, etc.
You can blame it on academia and MBA schools, you can blame it on the culture that we imported with the H1Bs, you can blame it on regulatory posture fanning the flames of all this, IDK, I tend to blame them all. But it absolutely happened. And now that we've incurred the cost of running that way just by virtue of our workplace culture changing there's a lot less operational cost to onboarding an offshore team.
Everyone should just be a small cog in a big machine.
it remains to be seen if thats going to be the way in ~10 years after the dust has settled.
i suspect those middle managers will try to fight tooth and nail to hold onto that status quo, because it leaves them with all the power.
I'm not sure I'd apply "good" as a modifier. Being generous, maybe "mediocre."
Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job.
I have a feeling that LLMs are going to drastically improve the baseline quality of software. The top end will always require exceptional human involvement, but it will look different.
Mediocre looks for “one size fits all.”
It’s been my experience, that humans; even ones that share much in common, have many different drivers, strengths, and limitations.
Culture also plays a big role. The US has a culture that encourages individual expression, and that’s one of our strengths (and limitations).
I spent many years, working for a Japanese company, and their culture is a much better environment for “one size fits all.” In their case, it actually became a huge strength, but their approach would not work in the US.
To use a food analogy; this approach may works very well for a boutique upscale food joint chasing Michelin stars. This doesn't scale to the size of, say, McDonald's. At that stage, variability and creativity are a negative, and guardrails are good. You want literate warm-bodies that can follow well-established procedures step by step. When your engineering staff complement grows over 50,000 - it may get difficult to find (and retain) those who are "exceptional".
It's not just about scale either, if you're a content, sole-proprietor hole-in the wall operation, (expensive) exceptional people aren't going to move the needle,and may even be detrimental to your viability.
If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money
I remember their cheerful atmosphere about "geeks" getting pushed back down thanks to offshoring
Companies have decided now that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.
However, the mediocre India talent pool shouldn't be expected to drive Claude very well. The impact to companies will be devastating once they realize that in about 6-12 months when they finally realize they have to deal with the piles of garbage that were created.
What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?
They are not allowed to sink their free cash into R&D and not get heavily taxed for it anymore.
They were tolerated by the domestic workforce because times were good. Times are no longer good, so they're no longer tolerated.
You see this sort of pattern in all sorts of issues, not just H1Bs and tech.
Solutions? Well, it varies from how invested you are to solve it, are you open to tame capitalism and dismantling the concept of infinite growth and minimizing expenses while maximizing profits? Or are you open to regulate the tech market just like other sectors, and mandating a human gatekeepers regardless of how smart the AI is? There are many solutions but I highly doubt any will be done in the current political atmosphere.
I have seen things like this. They often just look like backend swe jobs though? Are people getting these kinds of titles without masters in ML? Or pivoting somehow?
> Now, one of the most popular jobs in tech may be forward deployed engineers,
This is true? Are people pivoting to this really?
Everything else is just an inflated title to make the company seem AI forward.
In the past you might have been asked to add to the CV that you're into devops when you're just expected to trigger deploy jobs, or to explain that you take data-driven decisions when you're just adding some metrics to a powerpoint to justify a move that would have been done anyway, or to define yourself as a product engineer when they just want you to give a crap about users and be able to interface normally with managers.
Now there's a lot of "forward deployed engineers" that are actually just consultants or people interfacing with third parties, or AI-native devs that are just a guy using claude and maybe touching a couple mds.
This is not to say that significant changes aren't coming to the field, but the job application buzzword game is business as usual.
Existing companies are converting their desirable staff to these titles.
Half of my team are now "AI engineers" of some sort. It's really just indicative of who uses Claude/Codex the most.
It's not that different from when "sys admins" became "devops engineers", "db administrators" became "data engineers", etc.
If it weren't for healthcare, despite the lack of income for presumably the next year, I assume I'd be screwed.
China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.
[1] http://english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2024-07/30/content_11733...
> you live in the best time to exist in history. Stop complaining. Imagine how bad it would be if you were a poor peasant farmer like all those people before you
> We don't need you anymore. Have you considered becoming a poor peasant farmer?
Isn't farming mostly automated anyways? I can't imagine China needs masses return to the fields for any reason other than go keep them occupied.
It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago i would be 100x wealthier than I am today. Whether or not you met the right bar, got into the right company at the right time is the difference between a tedious endless struggle and securing your family’s wealth for the rest of the century.
For that matter, that could easily happen to Anthropic millionaires. There's usually a 6-month lockup on employee sales after IPO. They are hoping the stock market (and specifically Anthropic stock) does not crash in the 6 months before they can sell, and this is far from a given in a rising interest rate environment with the potential for renewed hostilities against Iran. They also to be sensible enough to take profits off the table and diversify when they can, which not everybody is.
Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy, but those experiencing it often aren't any happier than those who have their needs met. Look at any of the tech (b|tr)illionaires; do they seem as genuinely happy/content as the neighbor down the street who gardens regularly and has a tight-knit group of friends and family they spend time with?
Don't get me wrong, money is great! But the "keeping up with the joneses" never stops. You quickly adjust your mindset and feel poor compared to your buddy who has 400 million dollars.
Of course that's also part of why I'll never be in a position to achieve a $40M payday, so there's that.
It’s also great to the wealthy. Speaking as someone moderately wealthy myself. Not having to worry about day to day bills, being able to splurge on friends and family for a celebration or when they have an emergency, being able to travel to see things because you read about it in a book and want to check it out, and being able to single-handed direct non-profit efforts to achieve civic outcomes you’d otherwise have to spend months or years building consensus around, all of these are tremendously rewarding. I agree that once folks get into the billionaire bucket there seems to be a negative return on wealth. But going from having to think about the mortgage to not is a major step up in quality of life.
Now if you already have those things (top-tier school, connections, world-class experience on resume), you can probably still and a cushy overpaid position somewhere, just look for somewhere else they are lighting money on fire.
As someone who thumbed their nose at academia being a proud self-taught techie from Old Schoolia, stuff like that makes me feel echoes of aristocracy (I do have a degree howeve). I recently interviewed a bunch of grads and picked the one who wasn't from an Ivy League - specifically because he showed tons of self-directed learning and curiosity and humility, while the others had grand plans that had absolutely nothing to do with our group function and mission. As someone who's been around a while, some of my worst work experiences were with autistic geniuses who acted proud and mean, and ended up making the environment toxic.
Indeed, but they birthed the god from which they derive divine right.
It's the same claim like bitcoin. Many would say that if they bought bitcoin, then they would've had a massive return. But the bitcoin price is the way that it is because of people not buying early. There's no guarantee that the price would've moved the same if you bought earlier.
Figured I'd just give some food for thought to hopefully make you feel better.
Those that passed would have still remained ahead, from their continued improvement.
How much of this is just everything IT-related being rebranded as AI?
It's just all so contradictory and dishonest. It's an important topic to discuss because the gravy train is ending for all of us, regardless of which border you reside within, but too many people get way too emotional as soon as you bring it up.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Bread_and_Without_Work
But is the downturn due to A.I.? I doubt it. The job market was booming after COVID and companies were hiring like there was no tomorrow. Things are now settling down to sane levels and means many will lose their jobs.
Also there's a general downturn from import tariffs and higher energy prices.