I got a stable job! I was unemployed for a few months, we paid a small fortune for health insurance, and I got ulcers from the stress, but things worked out! I enjoy my team, and I'm hopeful about 2026.
Microsoft Access form that connects via IIS to an Excel spreadsheet acting as a database. Also the server it's running on is sitting on a wooden table.
The thing about language is that words have a weird distribution. The most common 100 words show up in every single sentence, but then tons of "common" words show up statistically almost never. Like, "octopus" is a common word that is only going to be useful if you're talking to a marine biologist, or a three year old that's obsessed with octopuses, otherwise you're hardly ever going to use that word. There's a lot of words like that. "Spine" of a book? It's probably not "spine" in your target language.
Yes, you have to be a genius to go through a 1yr online remote masters program which is mostly group work and essentially a fee for undercutting others on the queue:
That argument only works if society distributes wealth more equitably.
Current setup simply brings in foreign labor so that capitalists can reduce wages and they pocket the profit, while Americans pocket the costs. Not to mention migrating for purely economic reasons is obviously not going to make the locals like you very much.
Nah, the employer will happily get rid of the US headcount and rehire the same guy in their home country or UK/Canada etc while paying a third of the salary. Zero employer is going to pay $100k.
At big tech companies they are already paying $200k or more than they'd pay the same worker in their home country for existing H-1Bs. An extra $100k might tip the scale for some but not for all.
The most likely outcome is that body shops can no longer afford H-1Bs, but big tech still can.
> The most likely outcome is that body shops can no longer afford H-1Bs, but big tech still can.
For publicly-held large tech, the equation isn't about affordability but about maximizing shareholder dividends. Moving jobs overseas has long been the preferred means to that end.
Sure, but they have always been able to do that. It's always been cheaper to hire employees overseas than to employe H-1Bs here. Making H-1Bs more expensive increases the delta and probably makes it more attractive for some jobs. But clearly there is some value in employing people in the US or they would have already moved the jobs.
> Sure, but they have always been able to do that.
I think the newness (some period before 2020) of tech in general tended to intimidate those legacy shareholder groups who got in early. And I suspect that early shareholding was often dominated by employees, etc (not sure tho).
I think those interests plus the proximity to adjacent industries created strong interest in US Gov's (now-former) incentives to create to bring many of the best minds here.
We've dialed back all the above. We've put truly hostile interests in power that are weaponizing Gov assets & millions of supporters - against every manifestation of immigration. Our actual outcomes are flavored with rising Gov violence and populist animosity toward (mostly non-white) immigrants and those associated with them.
Considering what and where we are, I absolutely see this high-paying, historical class of jobs being shipped overseas.
Cheap labor exists because there is a demand for it. Body shops don't pay those wages - companies who hire those bodies from body shops do. So, body shops are going to raise prices accordingly.
"You need someone to manage your Oracle/SAP ERP systems and do a horrible job of it? And that person needs to be here locally? That will be an extra $60k from our last contract because we cannot bring in cheap bodies now." (assuming they eat $40k of the costs)
In the meantime rural medical centers will be devasted because many teams are made of H1B doctors.
H1B certainly requires more government oversight. But doing their jobs or applying critical thinking skills isn't a criteria for this administration.
>Amazon has over 10k H1B workers. Think about how much money it means.
Something like 0.3% of their yearly profit.
They're already paying probably somewhere near $200k a year more. Clearly it's not for no good reason. Clearly there is some advantage to employing them here if they are already willing to pay $200k more than they have to.
An extra $100k doesn't erase whatever that value is. The question is, is employing them here worth $200k to Amazon, but not $300k? Likely the case for some employees, but almost certainly not all.
It's exactly like the tariff war with china. India refused to put sanctions on russia (who helped india in its wars with pakistan, who received help from USA), so now trump is saying we don't want your people in here. The outcome is probably going to be similar to the tariff war as well. They'll start out with totally absurd bullshit and then come down to something more reasonable. Maybe $10-20k per worker per year. From the point of view of the state, humans are just another resource, like crude oil. If you don't have something, you import it. And what's happening right now is haggling at the global scale. It's just a bunch of gorillas thumping their chests. Nobody cares about the citizens.
Exactly, so this $100K fee shouldn't change anything that isn't already happening. If they could ship the jobs elsewhere that you're worried about, they would have already?
They are, and increasingly so for the past 2-3 years. I guess you have not been paying attention.
I know as a matter of fact that my company and other companies almost exclusively create new headcounts in India/UK/Germany. US headcounts are only for replacement or as exceptions. Even some replacement headcounts are moved overseas.
Exactly, so this $100K fee shouldn't change anything that isn't already happening. If they could ship the jobs elsewhere that you're worried about, they would have already?
Certainly some will, but if we have learned anything from the 1990-Now, it is that remote R&D doesn't always save money or even work effectively at all.
The pressure to juice short-term dividends is as ceaseless as gravity or oxidation. It has to be overcome before lessons-learned can transform into wisdom-based outcomes.
As someone who works with colleagues from India (like, physically in India), I don't see any reason the company keeps me over some other random guy in India, to be honest.
A big change from then to now for remote collaboration is better connectivity in general, and technology such as Zoom and Teams. But how do you handle the time zone difference? That has always been the issue I've seen with any kind of real-time collaboration with contracrors or employees in India. If it's work that doesn't involve that, then what is the big difference now? Github? Slack?
If companies like airbnb allow you to work from anywhere in the world, it means timezone is not a problem. It definitely needs some investment though.
> what is the big difference now?
What is the difference between pre-2020 full-time in-office, vs 3 day or even fully remote? Nothing, in my opinion (CEOs don't agree though). If people are productive with 3 days in office, that could have been the norm before 2020.
All you need is someone actually making it happen.
No, because after the spectacle of human cruelty from the initial implementation has faded, large companies will cozy up to the regime ($$bribes$$) and the per-employee government fees will be waved.
Furthermore as we've seen with "return to office", companies are more concerned with having control than with the bottom line. This new dynamic gives them one more thing to hold over H1Bs heads. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of H1Bs increases.
>The median salary of someone on H1B is higher than someone not on H1B.
Not within the same job in the same location they aren't.
If you're on an H-1B and you get fired or laid off, you have 60 days to find a new job or be deported. That creates an underclass of workers who are willing to put up with much worse working conditions and work longer hours. That drives down working conditions and wages for everyone.
“In fiscal 2018, 70% of approved H-1B petitions were for workers 30 years of age and older—a significant indicator that those workers already possess at least six to eight years of experience. Further, H-1B workers’ educational levels, which are an important determinant of skills, indicate they should be filling higher-skilled positions. In fact, 63% of all H-1B workers held an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctorate degree),32 meaning one could reasonably conclude that a majority of H-1B workers have the educational attainment and/or years of experience to fill positions at wage levels 3 and 4. These data suggest it is likely that H-1B employers are underpaying workers relative to their skill levels.”
Anecdotally, I have seen the h1b under leveling happen multiple times. But not sure it’s common enough to skew the data but it does stand out when it happens because you have a great engineer with 10 years experience and you find out they are an SDE1. For every one of those there are probably 10 that are correctly leveled or over leveled.
Not really. The H1b and O visas were never used for "genius" talent, they are typically used by the WITCH companies to pay people bottom-rate wages (40k-60k for HCOL city) so companies can underpay market wages.
If you have to pay 100k, you might as well hire an American worker. The "shortages" will mysteriously disappear.
When I got my first LCA 14 years ago, the min salary my employer had to pay was 77k (and I actually got 90k). How on earth do Indian outsourcing companies get 401ks for employees earning only 40-60k?
70% of H1Bs are from India: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/20/h-1b-visa-fee-timel.... That’s five times more than China. Are we really to believe that the supermajority of “the best minds of the world” come from a single country? Or is the marketing of H1B quite different from the product Americans are actually receiving.
India has 130 million college graduates, and 70% of H1bs. Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia together have over 50 million graduates, but only around 2% of H1bs combined.
The point is that it strongly suggests the system is being abused by India. Even excluding developed countries where people might lack incentive to move, India doesn’t come close to having 70% of “the talent.” Latin America alone probably has as many college graduates as India, accounting for higher college attendance rates. But Latin America accounts for a small share of H1bs while India accounts for 70%.
That argument is not sound. English is an official language of India, of course Indians are much more likely to seek work in the UK and the US than people from Latin America. You have failed to present any evidence concerning the skill levels of Indian H1B holders, and, moreover, since India has the largest population of all countries, those 130M college graduates must have gone through some very tough selection.
> English is an official language of India, of course Indians are much more likely to seek work in the UK and the US than people from Latin America.
The U.S. is also much closer to Latin America, and has a large Latino community already. The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
> since India has the largest population of all countries, those 130M college graduates must have gone through some very tough selection.
This is the most desperate and feeble attempt to save an argument I've seen in a long time. How about you try find some actual evidence to support your claims instead these wild constructions.
> The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
You base your position on these kind "hunches"? "Just too huge to explain". No, it isn't just too huge to explain. It's really that simple. India is the largest country of the world in terms of population, English is an official language of India, hence there is a substantial amount of people with high qualifications who use those qualifications to seek employment in major English speaking countries like the US and the UK with visas like the H1B. There are also many Chinese people in those countries but the language barrier makes it much harder for them.
People from Latin America have a hard time getting hired for highly qualified jobs in the US for various reasons, one of them being the language barrier.
By the way, if there was some conspiracy to hire Indians with low qualifications, then you'd still have not done anything to explain why these people should be Indians as opposed to Latin Americans. The argument makes no sense. Can't you see that? I'm genuinely puzzled.
Now you're replacing a general statement about a whole subcontinent with one individual case of a company from this year. I'm done with that conversation. Have a good day!
Cognizant is the second largest recipient of H1bs, accounting for almost 5% of all H1bs approved in 2024. So we have outcomes that don’t make sense (one country receiving 70% of H1bs) plus proven discrimination against American workers by the second largest H1b visa recipient.
I’m an armchair commenter, not a federal prosecutor. But this all seems very fishy. If I were in the administration, I’d start investigating all the major H1b employers to see whether there’s preferential hiring of Indians going on.
I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.
I've lost consulting work because I'm a lot more expensive than $20 a month. I've literally had clients say, "yeah, I would have called you, but I was able to figure out that bug with ChatGPT."
Once the bugs stack up, they'll call you back and it will be lots of billable hours. At least, that was the case for me; only took a few weeks before the clients own inconsistent requirements bite them in the ass. Gotta have a business+tech expert to make many products. AI is neither; and many folks can't prompt for shit (and can't spec for shit; and can't test for shit).
Not to discredit anyone else's experiences, but I have one client, who admittedly has gotten pretty good at "vibe coding", and he has been tasking me with all kinds of stuff that would have probably remained just as idea.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI. I don't like that I have to use it sometimes, and I think we were better off without it, but so far it hasn't hurt me. It's definitely made me way less employable in the traditional sense. I feel sorry for the new grads/self taught people trying to get jobs.
That an interesting perspective, about working on a lot of your client's vibe coded fever dreams. Yeah, I'm don't envy 19 year olds looking for software work right now. God help them.
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