IMO it's far too early for "AI" to have had a meaningful effect on Software company hiring. A more plausible explanation for me is that between roughly 2012 and 2022, there was a tremendous increase in the supply of SWE talent (via undergraduate CS programs massively increasing enrollment, boot camps, immigration, etc), fueled primarily by ZIRP. On the demand side, ZIRPy VC funding primarily went to bullshit Crypto and (to a lesser extent) bullshit Metaverse companies, most of which have not panned out, meaning there is a dearth of late stage and newly public companies to hire said talent.
I agree with all of this, coupled with a decent amount of layoffs from the Mag7s, though I'm not sure how distributed those were in California, necessarily.
And old unicorns like airbnb and uber now having to compete with traditional hotels and taxis again.
I think Elon's takeover of twitter set something of a precedent too: if he could reduce headcount as much as he did and still have a functioning product, then why can't I?
BTW I also don't think it has much to do with that engineering tax deferral code change that people keep talking about. My cynical hunch is that that topic keeps getting seeded by the billionaires who have the most to gain by reversing it, and hey maybe they'll hire an extra engineer or two afterward just to be good sports, but it's not going to reverse any major employment trends.
Yeah, actually it looks like you're right about the tax code impacts. Doesn't seem like it'd be causing layoffs just yet though, but could definitely be putting hiring on pause due to the uncertainty.
It doesn't have to be either-or. I think there are a bunch of factors all contributing to the current state of developer job market:
1. Rise of remote work: sure, it was there in some form. But prior to 2020, state of the remote work tools was abysmal. The prevalent culture was also about hiring the whole teams. After covid, remote work tools are far better. And companies learned to onboard one new remote hire at a time which over time is now allowing them to replace US workers with cheap overseas ones at a manageable pace.
2. end of cheap money - if the risk free rate is 4-5%, the demand from risky ventures like software startups is going to go up. So funding has dried up at the margins.
3. rise in the discount rate - related to the previous point, the discount rate one applies to investments have gone up. That means startups valued at 1B are now valued only at a few hundred millions. So to avoid down or flat rounds, startups have to cut costs drastically and show profitability to justify a higher valuation. Cue all the job cuts, belt tightening and death marches with a skeleton crew.
4. rise of AI - AI is helping with productivity of coding and non-coding tasks. It is also acting as an excuse for #3 when laying people off.
In my experience, all these are meaningful factors for the abysmal state of the developer market.
Definitely agree that it's not mutually exclusive, however I think 4 is likely orders of magnitude less impactful than the others...so far. Which isn't to say the effects won't start to magnify soon.
I think most of the trends we are seeing started around 2022, but if AI delivers on its promise things may accelerate in the coming years.
That's a poster child of a casualty of ZIRP. Hard to imagine an industry any longer duration and hungry for cheap risk.
I'm not sure about the thesis that this is primarily fallout from free money and suppressed interest rates though. That was really a '22 story, and even with long and variable lags, that element has been in play for a while now.
Oversupply of talent definitely sounds like a good argument though. I'll posit there has been some disruption by recent developments in the industry. Also, while metaverse and crypto startups may be passe, the AI scene has disgusting amounts of hype and money, and crypto ain't dead either, which brings me back to the earlier point that I do think some disruption is there to fill the gap in the narrative.
For people I talk, it is the end of ZIRP that caused it. ZIRP ended in April 2022.
Even as interest rates went up the VCs still had committed funds to distribute for a year to 18 months. Then the biotechs had runway for 1-2 years from that. Now that’s all gone, and they can’t raise their next series. In the meantime, C> plus synbio is recently having a lower win rate than hoped for.
That plus all the money that is there is all going to AI companies due to the shorter time to return / higher potential roic / hype.
Zero Interest Rate (monetary) Policy targets short-term interest rates at or near 0% to stimulate economic growth via extremely cheap borrowing, to encourage spending / investing / risk-taking
My anecdata - the large tech company I work for has practically stopped hiring. I went from conducting interviews practically every week in the first quarter to none at all on the post 3 months. Even during the layoffs on 2022 they were still hiring for some positions, so I conducted around 1-2 interviews a month.
I'm literally one of the last software engineers my company (in the Bay area) ever hired. I've been here for 2 years and only 1 engineer joined since then, meanwhile dozens left.
Same in mine - started off as 800, had a salary freeze for a year, had a hiring freeze for now 2 years and after layoffs and people leaving we’re now at 480
What if this turns into rust belt but for software? Once high paying jobs gone with AI, politicians trying to please grumpy software developers promising them to open a software shop and create jobs. Mostly college drop-outs, voting for a certain party that promises to take on AI :)
Half kidding of course, but AFAIK many industries went through such a transformation and today most social and political issues stem from those areas that once were affluent lost their industries. Why not the software too?
It's precisely this. Trump is allowing one of the last vestiges of the American middle class to be outsourced to India. Just like Clinton allowed the same to happen with factory jobs to China.
As a person of color this is even more detestable.
At least we will be able to get jobs putting plastic forks in boxes now. Maybe we will be able to use those green GitHub tiles to negotiate better pay.
I mean... yeah? Tim Cook and Trump were documented buddies in the first term of his presidency. No over-the-table attacks over offshored manufacturing or outsourced services. They probably celebrated the demise of Intel over a filet mignon and Coca-Cola while discussing the merits of lower manufacturing margins.
The idea that now Trump (or anyone, for that matter) wants to bail-out American chipmaking is laughable. Intel bet wrong, and now all of America has to satisfy itself with being critically reliant on Taiwan for our highest-margin products. You don't have to blame Trump, but there's no reason any corrective action shouldn't have been done during the first term. We either let Intel drown or send them a government-issued life raft - we can't teach them to swim from underwater.
Actually it was Nixon who single-handedly pushed manufacturing to China, and Reagan who pushed harder.
Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.
IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.
> The other side did have 4 years to fix it, though.
They did try, incorporating some relief into a bill in 2021, however:
> In the House version of the Build Back Better Act passed in November 2021, the effective date for the amendment made by the TCJA to Section 174 was delayed until tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. While this specific provision of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support, comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) in late December indicating his opposition to the bill effectively stalled progress on the Build Back Better Act, making the path forward on legislation unclear.
That bill did narrowly survive, but only in a stripped-down form with that Section-174 provision removed to satisfy the Senate fence-sitters. Manchin later left the Democratic party.
For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?
For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.
I live in Canada and most skilled developers self-sort into the American market as it's a 2x salary differential.
Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.
I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.
It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...
Canadians self-sort into the US because of money. If they could earn the same amount working from Canada, almost none would pack up their lives and move to a new country.
I don't think it's this simple. Maybe it would be for larger corporations that would rather hire more cheap staff than fewer quality staff. You shouldn't have this issue if the company values the experience the staff has instead of just looking at them as an expense.
I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.
So bizarre to hear stuff like this said as if it's a future hypothetical.
Outsourcing dev work to India because it's "cheaper" has already maximally happened since decades ago.
So if your theory was correct there'd be almost no western developers by now. And yet there they are, making half a million a year working for big tech in California.
The only way your position can pass even a basic sense check is that you mean you think these companies are paying 5x just to see their devs in person?
A (large) fraction of software development is outsourced to India for years if not decades but it jumped with the end of ZIRP. Outsourcing has downsides but the difference of salaries is also a part of the equation.
It'll be interesting to see the affect of AI on this. My guess is it'll actually reverse the pattern somewhat since the amount of manual work is reduced and thereby the premium on fast and clearly-understood comms has increased.
Hard to predict. In the areas I know well LLM don’t improve my productivity that much but they allow me to do something in areas I don’t know well e.g. write code in an unfamiliar language (likely bad code but sometimes that better than nothing). So maybe juniors + LLM will replace middle level developers.
Job market is better for seniors right now but that’s mostly because employers can sometimes hire a senior for money they would pay to a junior during late COVID boom.
Every software job I’ve had for over a decade has had at least one employee on the team working in a different office or from home. Frequently different time zones. This was already a reality and as the other guy in the thread said, we’ve already seen maximal outsourcing.
>So what if the guy works night and sleep days
is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of
Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve
Nope, this is a well known pattern. Western startup, grows, matures, MBAs take over, all they can do is look at cost numbers because they can't value anything, so send all the jobs to lowest bidder overseas, look at this sudden jump in profits! Surely we now all deserve fat bonuses. Get those bonuses, quietly move on to other jobs, company enters descent phase, new startups have since started eating into their markets, they've no way to respond because they're corpse-companies, slowly get consolidated and cannibalized and Toys-R-Us-d into the ground.
Whether you work from home or not does not change the fact that the work can be done remotely. You think your boss values the watercooler chitchat so much they would really pass on hiring someone at 1/5 of your salary working harder than you?
The return to office mandates were mostly a power play and a cost saving measure.
Why does Google hire anyone anywhere for half of their positions, when they could just literally not hire anyone and get the same amount of production code without wasting everyone’s time? It is absolutely not as simple as you seem to believe.
I also have been saying this and was shocked to see that US developers demanded WFH instead of actively trying to stop it becoming a thing. I was trying to understand what makes them believe that their company will pay them 5 to 10 times more money to sit in front of a computer somewhere outside the company rather than someone who is in the other side of the world.
USA based ones have some advantages, like the timezone and the familiarity to the culture but both of these things are actually fixable and when fixed it saves a lot of money. I came to conclusion that US based developers must be thinking that they are better than everyone and that's why they are being paid these salaries.
The space I work in, which I don’t plan to leave, is hardware/software/embedded. I am hybrid, and sometimes I go in twice a month. When trying to integrate hardware into a system over a software interface (CAN, various serial, i2c, eth, etc) I am on-site daily.
Then integrating a whole subsystem into the actual product, same deal. I spend as much time holding a wrench or a meter as I do writing code.
This is very hard to outsource.
I skipped the whole webdev movement. Closest I got was using Wt (C++) to make an engineering interface for a system once, so non-engineers could actuate relays and devices.
I do think I’m better than most people at this. I don’t think it can be outsourced, and I am not concerned.
People can argue about the latest js framework or how amazing rust is for the next 15 years, at which point I plan on retiring.
This type of work is largely recession-proof and offshoring-proof.
If it can be done more cheaply then some competitor will do it and kill your business that doesn’t. Either find another competitive edge (be better or convince somehow the customers that you deserve the premium you ask for), or do what Trump does, introduce tarrifs for imports and cutoff the more more efficient companies from reaching the local market. And of course pay the price for it.
The rust belt can't really fall back on tourism like California can. Worst case scenario all software jobs evaporate and it becomes Florida with better weather
LA has a highly diverse economy, it’s really only the Bay Area that has diversification issues.
The rust belt actually does quite well with tourism, though my research for responding to your comment seems to indicate to me that tourism is important everywhere.
Back in the 90s, it was the opposite as miliary/aerospace declined in SoCal.
I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.
I’m over in the rust belt and all I hear about California these days is it’s full of homeless people and crime that goes unchecked. It’s not looking as appealing as a vacation destination as it did 20 years ago. Maybe this perception doesn’t match the reality you see living there, but when it comes to attracting tourists, perception is everything.
I can only assume you think I’m watching Fox News all day. Here is an article from CNN[0] which talks about the significant number of stores closing in a popular tourist area, and while they try to explain all the reasons for it, homeless people (sorry, “unhoused populations”) and crime are still mentioned. It also mentions California has 30% of the counties unhoused, which is way higher than I thought it would be and paints an even worse picture than the one I had.
This article is a couple years old, so maybe things have started to turn around from the investments that were made, but reputations take time to change, as good news doesn’t get reported on nearly as often as bad news.
Unfortunately, if you live in a different country, it’s quite difficult. The only news coming from the USA are the shocking ones. All news organisations are like this. I didn’t hear anything else about for example California in the past decades in European news, just these:
- Schwarzenegger
- Homelessness
- Fires
Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.
And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.
But of course that’s true for every single country.
I'll take "lawless" California over seeing the same Rankin cop watching a stop sign at the entrance to Braddock in order to write "rolling stop" tickets every 15 minutes. I also like that I don't have to worry about a police chief holding me at gunpoint because the fire alarm happened to go off while I was alone in a warehouse space that I was renting.
I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.
There are plenty of dying places in the desert and on the beach tourists can visit, it's just the "dying places" part that makes them aversive to tourism.
The lamp industry didn't go anywhere. The Camera industry didn't go anywhere. Might as well be saying, where has the CRT monitor or Macromedia Flash industry now?
Haha so true. Though I feel for this to happen the cost of building software products has to be high. With manufacturing your average mechanical eng grad cannot build something and sell (factories' costs etc) out the gate.
With software any body can build and put something out there (ignoring quality and tech debt and taste etc). Where software might go the way of manufacturing is when price of ai actually reflects hardware costs (my estimates of the realistic Claude max pricing at cost is between 7-10k and month). Now put together other structures that will come up to "industrialize" ai+software software may not have easy entries sadly.
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.
“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”
I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.
There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI
Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.
When a manager prefers AI over a proven-performing employee, I would expect a lot if times it is becuse the AI is more intelligent than the manager, not the employee.
Sure, in total probably there will be even more and better jobs. Just like with the auto industry or the other industries that turned from producing stuff into designing stuff and telling to Chinese to produce it like this.
Define “jobs.” A lot of the “jobs” created by offshoring production involved being service workers for the 25% of knowledge workers who benefit from offshoring.
AI has already replaced thousands of jobs. Plenty of stories about that appear on HN. Plenty of anecdotes from people who have lost work or clients to AI. People here have stated their intention to fire their entire workforce and replace them with AI as soon as possible. AI companies have put up billboards saying "stop hiring humans." A single Google search would disabuse you of this notion.
I don't understand being this willfully naive, especially if you support AI, because using it to replace jobs is the entire selling point. No company wants AI for any other reason, and every company wants AI.
Of course there will be. There will be instances where a company has 4 people working in a role but with AI 2 people can do the same job and they can therefore let 2 people go. (and then there will be other places where even more jobs are created because of AI).
This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.
If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.
You are assuming human resources are hired based on budget only instead of need. Your assumption is: "we have 400,000$ to spend on something. Oh okay let's spend them on hiring 4 engineers at 100k each" and with AI they just happen to be as efficient as 8 engineers. Yay. They'll just do more things.
This might be the case at startups.
For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go".
In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.
"Jobs going away due to AI" really tracks two different outcomes:
- The type of job is eliminated due to AI
- The amount of people doing a type of job is substantially reduced because AI increases the productivity of people in that role and companies can do the same amount of that work with less people
I think the former is extremely limited so far, but the latter is pretty substantial. I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the people that did probably did so to reject the former argument.
The most common one is simply we wanted to cut heads and used ai as an excuse. Also AI spend is probably a huge drag on a lot of companies that are getting nothing off value but burning a lot
Mostly it's comprised of people angry with their lives and people in them, who need a quick cheap external target to rail against as a vent for that anger.
That's why you see so much aggressive black-white positions, nit-picking, and wording that intentionally floats just below the rule-breaking line of outright calling the other person a moron or piece of s---.
After reading the article it looks like the attribution is defensible:
"In contrast, professional and business services were down 7,100 jobs in July, the worst of any sector, and the tech-heavy information sector lost 1,000 jobs."
This could be many things. People could be leaving to do their own startups. The BLS counts that as a job loss thus high-velocity sectors can be reported as job loss.
In all fairness, plenty of people leaving the trappings of Big Tech are pretty capable of uprooting and doing business elsewhere; California offers relatively little other than what it has from existing inertia.
Agglomeration effects are real. Research has constantly shown that people working in high productivity area generate more wealth than the same people working outside high productivity areas.
The real problem, IMO, is that workers in the tech industry have voluntarily destroyed these agglomeration benefits by using the short period of power workers had during/after the pandemic to insist on work from home instead of better worker protections.
As a result, it’s very possible that high productivity areas in the U.S. are no longer that, and remote work has reduced all Americana’s productivity, making it impossible to justify the higher cost of living and salaries in big cities.
I dunno. I wish I could find places outside California like Iowa City or St Louis appealing, a simple million will get you a mansion with like fountains, a guest house, pool, tennis courts... In SF that's a two bedroom condo
Except climate. I was on a road trip this summer and stayed in Iowa City while driving East and then St Louis driving West. Downtown Iowa City was appealing. I had a good hotel at a bargain price near the St Louis airport although the area was not the best.
But it was hot. My time back in coastal California has been mostly in the 70s. Camping in Marin County this week, the high was in the 60s. Refreshing after heat warnings in Nebraska, Illinois and Ontario.
The majority of “SF” tech works in the South Bay that has plenty of 100f days. Also almost all the condos there have thin walls and no AC. So that means 80f all night in your $3000/mo 3rd floor crap box.
I do agree there is no winter in the SF bay though. That’s pretty nice.
Agreed about jobs in the South Bay. I commuted from Midpeninsula southward for 30 years.
100 degrees is unusual although it happens. I never lived in the South Bay so can't speak about AC. My house, built in 1947, didn't have it. It was a pain, maybe 2 weeks of the year, at most. It was in the 50s, most days of the year. Low at night in the summer, high in the winter.
I had early guidance that the climate was mild and I would live in a smaller house than I was used to but I would be outside all year. Check.
I didn't understand that there are only two seasons: spring when it rained sometimes and summer when it didn't rain but might be foggy in the morning.
My first year, I craved the rain after six months without. I've adjusted although the first seasonal rain is enjoyable like the first snow in the Midwest. But I don't miss the next 6 months of Midwest winter.
BLS includes a household survey. It's not just based on payrolls. They aim to capture as much as possible about people with informal work or self-employment.
Provided folks give some context about their location, experience, search, etc the input can be helpful - averages are great but aren't super instructive about one's own odds.
Plus BLS household survey probably has some non-response bias from it re: high income, low time individuals, precisely the folks chiming in.
I have a Teamster friend here in LA, and according to him practically nothing is being filmed in this area. The major studios are opting to film either out of state (Georgia) or in Canada.
I just noticed tonight that the movie theaters in my city closed up July 27--there's already weeds growing up out front. This was a really depressing epiphany because the mall next door is basically dead, too. I feel like 2020 killed this place but it's been a delayed reaction, same as my tech career. All we have now here in the upper midwest are people wandering around wearing outfits more suited to the desert conditions of Africa and I guess they don't go to the movies, so...
Time to start holding businesses accountable for pushing the cheaper labor option. Many of those on visas are biased toward those from their own cultural heritage as well.
> Many of those on visas are biased toward those from their own cultural heritage as well.
It’s not even “bias.” It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own. “It’s okay to be unfair to white people because they don’t need it like we do.”
I make the clarification because I’ve noticed it even among people who don’t have in-group bias. My mom quite dislikes other Bangladeshis, but only slowly realized over 30 years of living here that there are white-majority parts of the country with real economic challenges.
I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?
If its the former, I am not sure what you are trying to convey.
For myself - seasoned engineer, european pursuasion, I want to work with people that are open and collaborative. I've worked with backgrounds like mine I would never work with again.
I do have an issue with employers find an excuse to bias towards the lower cost labor pool that is H1s. And when teams get saturated that way, it perpetuates the same.
These days, I have found large companies with a tech component and smaller companies within tech centers are more diverse/inclusive (as you will) than the FAANG type companies.
> I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?
It’s hard to articulate because it’s more an absence of thought. Imagine robots run the world and tell humans what to do. You wouldn’t really think about the robots, and you wouldn’t think about their material interests. That’s kind of like how many desis view white people.
For example, consider the domination of the motel industry by Gujrati Patels: https://madrascourier.com/insight/how-gujarati-patels-took-o.... I suspect they don’t think of themselves as being “biased” by favoring other Gujratis. They don’t think about fairness to white people because why would you think about fairness towards your robot overlords?
Ok, I think what you are meaning is a certain cultural sect / group / region dominating. White supremacists, for me is a different meaning because, history. So I think I understand the cultural comparison.
If I am understanding right, you are not wrong. A group gets a manager of a certain cultural background (visa or not), the team hiring practice trends that way. Companies do not question this...They should.
Diversity in age, culture, ethnic background and experience build a better team.
The unfortunate thing is there are a few cultures that benefit from H1 visas (most prevalent) and propagate their leanings over being open.
American companies should be doing more to hire non-H1s, there is not a talent shortage, but they would rather not pay that additional percentage.
> It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own.
This is also an interesting way to explain the self-immolating Whites, which nowadays is most of us. Any sort of White group identity or collective interest is absolute heresy which must be opposed, while all things in the collective interest of non-Whites must be celebrated, encouraged, and helped along at our own expense. There's a certain paternalistic arrogance to it, an ethnocentric assumption that other races can't get on without us. And it's much more common and pervasive than the caricature of the like shaved head neo-Nazi we are all expected to imagine exists in large numbers, somewhere.
Absolutely. One time, I was explaining to this lady about immigration: that, if the shoe were on the other foot, folks from Bangladesh would’ve shut down the border long ago. She hissed at me: “well, we’re not Bangladesh!” White Americans are supposed to be above having normal human attachments to soil, kin, and clan.
With respect to chronology and cause/effect, I'd point out that provision took effect in January 2022, so it's been of-concern for a while.
It was put into law in 2017 with the Republican TCJA, but section 174 was time-delayed, part of a general trick of having all of the tax-cuts and spending immediately, with any budget "balancing" items deferred as long as possible.
Among other possible attempts(?) that touched on the issue, here's one in 2024 that Republicans blocked in the Senate, where they "filibustered" it by voting "nay" on cloture.
Alternate question: Why didn't the Republicans do something in the years before 2025 to fix the problem they created and which tech-company lobbyists absolutely told them about?
This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story, where Republicans are somehow never to blame because they're just toddlers or forces of nature, while Democrats are always at fault because they didn't stop the Republicans from burning the house down or clean up all the poop from the carpets or whatever, in an endless and impossible race.
By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
> That wasn't a clean bill
Well, that one happens to be a bill from a Republican, I was just looking for ones that affected that tax-provision.
In any case, did you check out the table-of-contents, and not just the page-length? It may not be as minimal-as-possible, but it's all tax-related stuff.
> This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story
Because only Democrats had agency when the law took effect? The president can veto any bill. Democrats passed two bills in 2021 and 2022 with zero Republican votes, zero, they could've easily included the repeal in those bills if they wanted to. They didn't coz they didn't want to, their stated policy is to raise taxes on corporations, how is this even debatable? Meanwhile the Republicans at that time had no agency. Once they got agency, they repealed it immediately, with zero Democrat votes.
Would you similarly blame the Democrats for all voting against the repeal as part of the BBB that just passed? You wouldn't and your reason would be "but the BBB contained a lot of other things apart from this repeal that the dems didn't like". Why won't you apply the same logic to the non-clean bill you brought up?
> By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
Huh, they fixed it immediately after coming to power. They couldn't fix it before the BBB because it needed to go in reconciliation because the dems don't suppor the repeal. They didn't fix it in 2019 because it wasn't even in effect yet and IIRC dems had the house. So how does the partisan vengeance allegation even make any sense?
What evidence led you to that conclusion? It feels like there's some Fundamental Attribution Error [1] going on here, where Republicans are getting a free-pass for the pain they created "because there were circumstances" (which is true) but somehow Democrats failing to remove the pain is automatically "because they wanted it that way."
I already shared some opposing evidence, that Republican-sponsored Senate bill with a repeal in it that still garnered strong (but not unanimous) Democratic support.
Here's another: Section-174 relief was originally included in the 2021 "Build Back Better" act, but--due to those tight partisan vote margins--a particular conservative-leaning Democrat (who later left the party!) decided to prevent it [0]:
> With the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) being all but dead in the Senate after Joe Manchin’s unexpected rejection of the bill, concerns remain high regarding the future of Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code. [...] But, with Senator Manchin’s refusal to support the BBBA, the legislation is now on its last breath, although the Biden administration remains optimistic that there is a chance of getting a modified version of the bill passed.
They controlled the Senate and the Presidency, and never allowed a clean bill(one introduced by Marco Rubio which was killed in the Dem controlled Senate committee) that restored the exception to come to vote. The Republicans came to power and immediately restored it, with zero Democrat votes.
I was laid off this year and also saw a massive uptick in offers in July. Based in Colorado, but was looking nation wide and I got more interest out of SF than the rest of the country combined.
Sounds like you're one of the lucky ones. In my experience, remote tech jobs have largely moved to India. It's like pulling teeth at my company to get them to offer a remote job in a NA timezone (US or Canada).
anecdata: I run a saas product and my primary customers are recruiters, after the BBB I have had more daily signups and new subscribers than previous months.
Partially! The text of the OBBBA actually made permanent the section of the tax code that treats software development as research and amortizes accordingly. However, because nothing can just be straightforward, it also allows domestic research expenses to be deducted immediately instead of amortized.
Definitely a much better tax situation but also not one we would've been in if not for the TCJA, and we still have an exposed oblique (the removal of the domestic research exclusion) that could put us back in the same spot unless the software development as research section is removed.
less recruiter activity than a few months ago, cleared one interview gauntlet just to have the role change due to a new lead hire, otherwise getting followups for screens but hit or miss on the tech assessments. might have to spend more time practicing. 10 yoe, SFBA.
sorry to hear that, keep it up, it was absolutely demoralizing for me during those 10 months I started to believe I was actually losing my mind after a literal 20 year history in startups/tech.
But my colleagues are all younger than me - they are hiring people out of college too, so you can make it just keep pushing
I'm not looking for work, but have a LinkedIn that I honestly forgot about until the end of July. It'd been so long since I got even recruiterspam I forgot about it. And out of nowhere, 2 or 3 target recruiter messages.
Why didn't the Biden admin "fix" the rule before it took effect in Jan 2022? They passed several bills, they could've have included the repeal. It took effect on the democrats watch, because of their inaction.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
The democrats were elected to undo the damage caused in Trump's first term. And they let the damage start and happen on their watch, because.. according to you, for the sake of political benefit while ordinary people suffered and are still suffering from losing and not getting jobs. They will probably do the same again if they're elected, intentionally keep things broken for political gains. It's sad to see people support and encourage such behavior.
If you passed it in the first place, and counted on repealing it before it would have taken effect, and failed to do so, then I blame you for passing it in the first place.
I have no problem blaming them. The biggest problem with Democrats is that they cede all their power to Republicans, and don't seem to use the power they have when they have it. You can have the best policy positions ever but you still suck if you can't capitalize on wins.
But the Republicans made this change to start with. That's a lot of blame. And if they did it just to create a political firestorm against Democrats later (which is exactly what they did), do we (A) recognize that politicians shouldn't be using Americans as cannon fodder to damage their political enemies or (B) blame their political enemies?
Dems were elected to undo damage. They chose not to because their platform is higher taxes on corporations and high earners, and ended up creating the tech downturn on their watch. Republicans came in and immediately reversed it with zero Democrats support.
Both sides are the same, Republicans destroy things and Democrats are not perfect in stopping and fixing them! "I am gonna support Republicans as they create problems and then blame Democrats" just makes you someone who intentionally creates problems.
Dems had the chance to fix it and intentionally did not. Republicans did it immediately once they had the chance. If Dems weren't elected in 2020 we'd have plenty of tech jobs now. Their fault, full stop. If Kamala was elected, her platform was even higher corporate taxes.
It's possible you need a supermajority or something to specifically "undo" laws passed by a previous session of congress - something Biden did not have.
In the Senate specifically you need 60 votes to break a filibuster. Filibustering, if we Americans remember from Civics/US Govt class in high school, happens when a senator exercises their right to speak for as long as they wish. Or at least it used to. There was a rule change a few decades ago to allow something called a “pocket filibuster” where you don’t have to keep speaking but you can block further motions on the matter. This requires at least 60 votes to break, so it’s effectively impossible to do anything in the Senate without that many votes now.
There were some legendary filibusters back in the day. One famous example was when Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights act by speaking for 24 hours continuously. He was not able to block the bill by continuing to speak because there are limits to how long someone is able to stand and deliver, and originally if you stopped speaking you had to yield the floor and allow business to proceed.
Republicans supported the repeal, so 60 votes in the Senate were possible if the Dems wanted to repeal it. They didn't want to, coz they passed two reconciliation bills with zero republican votes and could've included the repeal in either one of them. Their policy is explicitly to tax corporations more. They didn't even let the clean repeal bills have a vote.
It has been a common tactic to work around the filibuster and reconciliation rules, and to repeal them later. They didn't expect the democrats to oppose the repeal so hard and destroy tech jobs on their watch. They know no one will ever blame them for it, like you can see on HN. Democrats platform is all about higher taxes on corps so that tracks with their actions, jobs be damned.
They actually did NOT repeal the portion relevant to software development being considered research - it was actually made permanent and is pretty trivial to find by searching for "software development" against the text of the bill. What did change was an additional section to how research is capitalized, with domestic research being able to deduct immediately while other (i.e. foreign) research is subject to the amortization rules.
There are special rules called reconciliation that allow one party to pass a bill with just a majority. It can be used only once a year (hence why everything was packed into the big beautiful bill) and there are very complex and technical rules around what it can be used for.
So to answer your question, Republicans repealed it with zero Democratic votes because they included it in the once-a-year reconciliation bill. The bill that you are linking to would not have met this criteria.
It had Republican support so it would've gotten the 60 votes in Senate without needing to get reconciliation. It didn't even get a vote because the Democrats stopped it from proceeding with their control of the Senate. Their policy is all about higher taxes on corporation and high income individuals so it tracks.
> That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
Democrats controlled both the Finance Committee and the Senate. There was no way for Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. So it was necessarily stopped from moving ahead by Democrats despite Republican support. Another reason for the party in power blocking the vote would if the President opposed it, to prevent the scenario of Biden having to veto.
Edit: Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts and arguments. Stay classy, HN.
> Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts
This is not how HN works. Rate-limiting only happens when an account posts high volumes of comments that break the guidelines. It's nothing to do with downvotes or the political/idological flavor of what you post (we don't care and often don't know; all we care about is whether you're filling up threads with guideline-breaking comments, which is what ruins threads).
If you want rate-limiting turned off you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we can discuss it.
This can't be correct, since the system can't detect when comments break the guidelines. It's either based on flags or downvotes, or perhaps just total number of comments. It's definitely not based on karma, since I'm rate-limited.
Another possibility is that it triggers when a moderator gets pissed at a single one of your comments.
While it is a different bill, the fact the Democrats were fine having it in the bill passed by the House in 2024 does cast doubt on this notion that they didn't try to resolve the issue.
Hardly an unbeatable majority for Democrats on this committee. Especially since research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue.
> I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue
For the 10th time in this thread, the repealing bill DID NOT need to be revenue neutral since it had Republican support, all it needed was 60 votes in the Senate. Reconciliation only applies if a yearly budget bill can get at least 51 votes but not 60.
Sorry, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. I stated the same in another comment and was downvoted. I know HN is liberal biased but it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
> it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
Is this situation right now really "unusable"? Aren't you overreacting just a tad? People might disagree with you, I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation without getting upset.
Quite literally unusable because I got blocked by HN from commenting for more than two hours coz of all the politically motivated downvotes. If you have the right politics, keep commenting!
> I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation
See above, literally not able to have one because I dared to criticize Democrats for their actions and inactions that led to tech job losses for over two years.
> People might disagree with you
I'm open to arguments but looks like people disagree with the facts that I am bringing forward, so they're downvoting to suppress them to lower visibility and to discourage me from participating on here.
It's like on Reddit when you state a plain fact 'Musk founded SpaceX' in reply to a highly upvoted comment that said 'Musk bought all this companies' and get heavily downvoted and even permanently banned in large subs by highly biased moderators.
This place is turning into yet another BlueSky or Reddit where facts don't matter and only a one sided political narrative is pushed at all times. Don't think it's worth engaging. I don't want to be in a place where my comments are deemed so terrible that I get max downvoted and then unable to comment for several hours.
Ironically, such controlling behavior and shutting down of facts, criticism of one side and conversation is leading more and more people to vote for the other side. I am now ashamed of being a lifelong liberal and won't vote democrat till people change this obnoxious partisan behavior on platforms like this one.
So your opinions are unpopular and people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again?
Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
> people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again
For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.
Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
I actually addressed that in an edit to a parent post:
> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
Not sure how it addresses the fact that Democrats want higher taxes on corporations regardless of what you stated, hence they didn't act to stop this on their watch. You're just arguing that Democrats were wrong to let the R&D exception expire, which I already agree with.
Even after this recent change by Republicans, increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
> increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.
When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
> Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
No. The Democrats added a new minimum corporate tax last time they were in power. As I have to keep repeating, their policies and actions are all about taxing companies more which why they didn't repeal the R&D exemption removal. They consider it a tax loophole that companies abuse to pay less taxes.
Kamala's proposal was to increase the minimum corporate further.
No need to repeat yourself. Why are you getting so worked up? I think we'd all like to understand what the hold up was on these bills, but let's base that in supported facts, not partisanship.
As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference.
Two bills were passed with zero Republican votes in 2021 and 2022 by Democrats, the repeal could've been included in either if democrats wanted.
> As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference
There were only 27 members in the committee. So all the Democrats on the committee voted against the repeal and all the republicans voted for the repeal.
How is that a negligible difference? That's a massive maximum difference between the parties, in fact it was impossible to have a higher difference.
Do you have the voting records of this bill in committee? Of course there were 27 members, that's the sum of the Democrats and Republicans. That does not mean that they voted on party lines in committee.
If you are laying workers off you clearly don't need additional H1B workers. You should be barred for at least a year if not more from putting in any applications for H1B after any major layoff.
It should also be scrutinized if you preferably fire local workers over your H1B workers. Anybody caught doing so should be barred from H1B for a decade.
I like my H1B coworkers, but things have gone too far. You can't do layoffs and simultaneously put in applications for thousands of H1B workers. It makes no logical sense and should be illegal. The system is completely broken right now.
Not to mention most of this H1B work is not actually due to lack of local talent. Building a web or mobile app is not rocket science and there are plenty of people capable of doing so. Any company putting in H1B for anything but research positions or positions requiring exceptional expertise is probably abusing the system.
And yeah I have had great experiences with my H1B coworkers, but they are doing jobs that US professionals could easily do. At this point H1Bs are just (possibly unwitting?) scab labor.
H1-b s are small compared to the offshoring of jobs. Have you seen the office sizes of every big and medium technology company in India and other countries? They employ thousands of programmers there. There is a much greater number of jobs that you don’t even see that’s get done from overseas. This invisible layer is much bigger than the annual 65k h1b jobs.
I suspect this will become a key issue in Newsom's brand of center-left Democratic politics. It greatly affects both urban and college educated workforces - i.e the Democratic base. Canada took the lead here a few years ago under Trudeau's administration.
Might be a case of those who are permanently out of the workforce because they couldn't find work are not counted in unemployment statistics, along with flight and deaths of despair.
Careful. Coronado, Miramar, Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, Edwards, Mcclellan, Vandenburg, Travis, etc. How many bases do you think there are in Iowa?
It's more concentrated in the middle class now. There are this year lots of underemployment opportunities for the lower class, and with MediCal and other welfare you can make ends meet. I have worked in both economies.
After a long drought I've seen more recruiter emails recently but I do think the days of 500k-1M TC are dwindling. Big Tech seems to be moving a lot of positions to LCOL areas and I don't see that abating.
In the midst of a gold rush, sell shovels and maps
In the less glib way, I'll draw attention to the fact that machine learning roles are only one moving part of the machinery required to manage, operate, train, evaluate, demo, and integrate AI adjacent opportunities. That's to say one need not be a pytorch or differential equation ninja to contribute meaningful to riding the hype train
I'm not sure if this is entirely related, but during COVID (in SF) I was always surprised to see my colleagues so adamant against RTO once the vaccine was widely disseminated. I always felt that if jobs were remote there would be no need to hire us specifically - they'd hire in the cheaper parts of the country remotely or worse yet, other countries. The usual retort was that folks in North Carolina, Canada, Eastern Europe, Bangalore or whatever weren't as good - but I always thought such rebuttals were arrogant at worst, and ignorant at best.
Sad to see that to some extent that's exactly what happened. My current tech take is that developers shouldn't allow AI and/or agents to do the entirety of their job, rather allow them to do more, and it should be framed as such specifically. e.g. don't use AI to write the entire feature, use it to make the feature better and drive more revenue, or more correct and result in less bugs, thus less wasted effort on ops/etc.
It's amusing to see some people excited for AI to do the entirety of the implementation and planning, as if there would be no impact on us. If AI is that good, you just need TPMs (to the extent it's even possible, anyway).
It's no surprise to see that jobs that cannot be done remotely are making a comeback.
Having seen what happens when TPMs run things and otherwise smart engineers just do what they’re told, I can assure you this will not lead to good outcomes no matter how good AI gets.
It's not helpful to just talk about absolute numbers of jobs gained or lost in a sector without talking about percentages and historical variability.
It also appears the California number cited is based on a survey of ~4K people, some reporting they can't find work, while e.g., Federal unemployment is a function of people getting unemployment benefits. Do states do the same surveys with the same methodology, so the numbers are comparable? Likely not. So the term seems to be used in different senses, and "worst in the US" is unsupported.
Further, for tech in particular, it's not clear which jobs were converted to contracts, for AI services or outsourcing (in or out of US).
This kind of salad article is likely the future: enough for the general public worried about jobs, but not helpful to anyone who actually wants to understand and plan accordingly.
From the link: Employment and Unemployment in California (Based on a monthly federal survey of 4,400 California households which focuses on workers in the economy)
As an American citizen, born and bred, I would literally, physically fight you on behalf of keeping Waterloo grads in America.
Many of the best coworkers I've had the pleasure of working with, not to mention the founders of the company I spent over a quarter of my career at (Pagerduty).
hear hear! I've worked with exceptional people from all sorts of backgrounds, but pound for pound, Waterloo CS grads are significantly better on average than grads from any other CS program. They start off way ahead, but also maintain that edge throughout their careers.
Disclosure: I'm a US citizen with multiple CS degree from MIT and my son is studying CS at Waterloo now.
Nice. I an researcher at MIT LL. In order to work at the lab you need to be a US citizen since a lot of it is federally funded. I tried to get my buddy, a Waterloo grad currently at Google, an interview but he is Canadian...
A zero-sum mindset on a website dedicated to programming of all places? Where we literally create wealth out of nothing but coffee and the strength of our minds?
My love for my country means I want it to be the greatest in the world. Waterloo grads make America better. Period.
I've never met anyone that argued for open borders that wasn't capable of isolating themselves from the negative effects. Like say, a tenured professor like Bryan Caplan.
Open borders might be net-positive but would very predictably devastate the lives of poor people in America. Not that most people who advocate it know anything about being poor.
Hang on, are we upset that immigrants are taking the jobs of poor people in America?
I thought based on original post we were upset immigrants are taking high paying specialist jobs from the rich techies in San Francisco?
Or are they just just taking all the jobs while miraculously not spending any money and not creating any demand and not participating in economy at all?
I just want to understand this evil scourge appropriately.
P.s. (And oh, boy, will I compete in the "knowing about being poor" with anybody on HN :)
If they are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, that would imply that they are unskilled themselves. I don't see how they will be able to take advantage "opportunity tech jobs provide"--a highly skilled set of jobs.
I agree that poor Americans are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, but suggesting that highly skilled tech jobs are a solution is just not realistic.
1. If, say, an immigrant earns 70k, they will also spend 70k. It's an equilibrium - they "create" as much jobness as they "take".
2. The easiest intuitive explanation I have is - imagine a million immigrants move in. They're basically a self sufficient city - with police and doctors and teachers and mechanics and salespeople and whatever. Doesn't bother me.
In fact, America is by definition (unless one is native American) the land of immigrants. It is clearly factually historically obvious that immigration was not zero sum and it continually expanded overall prosperity and might of the American empire. It's only when we zoom into the very here and now that some people, for some reason, freak out and feel "omg immigrants!!".
1. Immigrants send to their home countries very significant amounts of their income, so it's always going to be net-negative in that sense.
2. Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
Of course America is a land of immigrants. And of course immigration can be positive-sum.
That doesn't prove that it's always positive-sum.
It's easy to see many situations that are not positive sum. Huge amounts of unskilled immigration is, at least in the short-term, going to be extremely zero-sum because they will consume far more public resources than they pay for, depriving the existing users. This has played out many times.
In other words:
Too much skilled immigration takes good middle class jobs away from citizens that need them.
Too much unskilled immigration takes public resources and jobs away from citizens that need them.
Given those facts, the argument should be about how much is too much of any particular kind of immigration for any particular time and place.
>> Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
I think you have the mindset where there are X jobs, static, unchanging, God given or government ordained or whatever, and if an immigrant takes a job that job is gone. Array, counter, n=n-1, done.
That's... Not my mindset, and I don't think that's how it works.
Those million people don't take a million jobs from some enumerated, inflexible list, and then shutdown. They live. They consume! They earn and then they turn around and they spend, they need homes and food and clothes and education, all of which is jobs.
I think you imagined a swarm of people who displaced others, but imagine literally a million people coming and creating a new city. So of the million, some are techies and some are janitors and some are farmers and some are doctors and they have a nice little self sufficient city and don't bug or impact anybody outside of that city.
If/when/once you visualize the concept of that self sufficiency, now we can discuss the more complex case of them joining an existing city - because yes of course it's more complex than people coming in and living independently, but it's also more complex than them stealing jobs off some imaginary closed list.
Let's not imagine scenarios that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
Answer this question: what evidence would you accept to show that major American tech companies are using skilled immigration to drive down their labor costs as the expense of American citizens?
I cannot keep up with the moving targets. My honest, sincere impression based on my best read of your posts is that you are making a sweeping claim against immigration along all axis and skill levels. I disagreed.
Now your claim is that massive American tech companies are profit-focused, narrow-vision entities with no social qualms or human values, and I could not agree more :-). But that’s orthogonal to the wider immigration discussion.
Lol. Called it. Always with the moving goal posts.
Oh but remittances are high! Think of the short term effects.
I will mention my Indian coworkers parents use the remittances to buy Netflix subscriptions, Coca-Cola and American Corn but it won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough.
Constant-pie thinking is an all consuming identity not a rational viewpoint that can be reasoned with.
Funny how you applaud yourself for being correct but make no actual arguments.
What are you claiming? That immigrants do not actually remit significant percentage of their income? That all or most remitted money comes back to America? That short-term effects do not matter even if they're highly destructive?
You're claiming that I believe in a fixed pie which could not possibly be further from the truth. But I do believe that some pies are fixed, some of the time, in some places. Are you claiming the opposite? That pies are never fixed?
You're the one who isn't arguing in a rational way.
“Demand is fixed, they're coming or your jobs” is your “Temperatures always rise and fall, there is no global warming”.
I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.
yup,Operation Paperclip. This program brought over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of whom were former members of the Nazi Party and some with SS affiliations, to the U.S. for government employment between 1945 and 1959.
The flip side should also be said, Canada and many other countries have talent drained by the US since they can't compete on pay.
It's hard to say, but who knows what could have been if the top Canadians had have to start or join Canadian companies and didn't have the option to take a higher pay in the US.
I like the way you think. As a Canadian, I’m disgusted that we educate our youth and then send them to the US to take jobs from Americans and pay taxes to the Americans. We should be putting them to work in Canada instead so we can build companies and industries in Canada instead of America.
> We should be putting them to work in Canada instead so we can build companies and industries in Canada instead of America
OK...I'll bite. Every Canadian government, of either party, has agreed with you for the last sixty years. Your country has excellent universities, the infrastructure is decent, the politics are non-violent...and yet people bail. I could say the same about the UK as well, but it's harder for their brains to drain to the US.
So: why is Canada failing to hold on to their homegrown talent? Is it a "push out" of Canada (driving talent away) or a "pull in" to the US (America having something irresistible)?
The American dream in silicon valley was built in part by these folks. They stay here and become Americans both culturally and legally and it's fantastic. Some of them even become Republicans.
As others have pointed out it's not a zero sum game since human capital begets growth.
Funny how H1Bs are responsible for the destruction of the American labor force but also happen to be represented most in the jobs whose salary and size have grown the most in the U.S. over the past 2+ decades.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that H1Bs are most represented in the industry that has generated nearly all the growth that has been generated in America over the past 2-3 decades.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that slave labor is most represented in the industry that generated nearly all of America’s economic growth during the 18th and 19th century.
Is the argument you're making, which is ridiculous.
The success of an industry says nothing about how exploitative or unethical its practices are.
The way many people like yourself seem to have been completely fooled by major corporations wanting cheaper labor to exploit (through both legal, semi-legal, and illegal immigration) will be studied for generations.
Their favorite trick (which you've adopted here) is to accuse people of being "racist" and "right wing" for objecting.
For the record, you would have to search long and hard to find someone more opposed to Trump and his minions than myself. Bernie Sanders has the same basic viewpoint I've expressed.
I have absolutely no hatred for anyone based on their origin or race.
I am completely in favor of allowing as many people into this country as we can sustainably absorb, and even a little more. At the same time, I strongly object to prioritizing the desire of major corporations to exploit cheaper labor at the expense of American citizens.
Your suggestion that these are "right wing" ideas when Bernie Sanders says the same thing and for the same reasons. You might accuse him of being "zero sum" but you can't accuse him of being right wing.
Not only is this mindset disgusting, it is completely wrong. Labor is not zero sum, jobs create more jobs. Immigrants are what has made this country great, allowing immigration was critical to the US becoming the industrial/financial/tech capital of the world. Shutting down immigration will weaken our economy, it will cost americans jobs.
there is no more american dream, and anyone who “creates” jobs in this economy and era of rampant hypercapitalism isn’t really enabling or transferring wealth.
if there were ample americans to do these jobs, they should be able to get them.
nationalism is a silly idea, anyway. and we should have free trade and movement with our biggest two allies. american exceptionalism is a joke
> Americans have no more right to success in America than non-Americans.
Americans literally voted to defund the education system, voted for administration(s) that will amplify spending money to hire foreigners to keep America center of top talent/skill across domains and most importantly voted for extreme capitalism.
There have never been more unemployed new college grads studying computer science and computer engineering. There are ample americans ready to take these jobs.
Boomers promulgated lies about "shortages" for years to lobby for relaxed visa schemes. Ironic you mention nationalism being silly, since Indians are some of the most openly caustic nationalists I encounter on a daily basis.
Are implying that reducing the number of graduates from a single program (CS) at one specific university (Waterloo) from a country 10x smaller from the US (Canada) will help lower tech employment in California?
Why should US graduates compete with non-US workers in the US? Call me scared or incompetent or uncompetitive but I just don't want to compete in that way. All those people can stay in their countries and out-compete US grads there.
Because technology is a global industry and if you can’t compete with these workers you surely won’t be able to compete with these workers when the company that was willing to pay them $150k to work in San Francisco can pay them $50k to work out of Romania.
Instead of that individual now paying 80-90% of their income to US taxes and US businesses and saving the rest in U.S. banks providing even cheaper capital for US businesses, they will be doing the same in Romania.
And worse, if that person does create a new startup, the majority of employees hired will be in Romania, and only a tiny fraction would be Americans who moved there to work for that company, and would be competing with American companies with a much lower cost basis.
I'm sure there are other smart USians but shit there's a fuckload more globally and I get to work with them and it's great. And then if they stay long enough they become citizens.
My rule of thumb is if I'm the smartest person in the room then we've got serious problems.
I really appreciate this generation of my fellow countrymen who just completely ignore all the benefits of brain draining literally every country on the planet of their ambitious and intelligent youth.
Oh well, better tell em all to go back. Might as well tell our allies to rearm because we’re worried about being ripped off. I for one will not feel ripped off when Germany has a functioning military again. It has always gone well for the planet when Europe is armed and angry
I have no idea what your point is with your first sentence. For your second sentence, what size of organization are you looking for? There was no single person or entity who decided to kick that off unilaterally
I couldn't agree more! Canada has massive potential, albeit also large issues with their immigration system being gamed.
In my opinion, outsourcing is a larger evil. The money used to pay the salaries of outsourced engineers should be taxed at-least at 20% (along with remittances to India) akin to what we currently penalize foreign countries for maliciously suppressing the cost of physical goods. This is called Countervailing Duty or Anti Dumping Duty penalties.
I've reached my limit with the entitlement of these people in the united states. Especially systematically excluding americans or non-indians once they reach a hiring level / role.
Arguably, the purpose of a company is to generate profit. If US companies need skilled workers that they can't find locally, they will open or expand their international offices. At least the O1/H1B visa holders pay taxes in the US and contribute to the local economy.
Arguably the purpose of a country is the furtherance of its citizenry. The US system should be set up to disincentivize US companies from bringing scab labor into the US.
In practical terms this would look like eliminating H1B/O1 programs.
Corporations are just absolutely devastated at the fact that they cannot hire an H1B in California for $150k but will now have to hire the exact same person in India for $60k in one of the most remote friendly industries in the world.
California’s economy feels like it’s running on tech companies at this point. Any downturn in their hiring has really big effects on the California state budget.
California has the most progressive taxation scheme of any state. Dividends and capital gains are taxed as income. I’m curious what you would consider “sufficient” taxation - the top marginal combined rate for a Californian is over 50%.
So the clickbait headline is "as tech falters" but tech actually had the least losses of any sector, except government. More correct in all possible ways would have been "as construction falters", "as manufacturing falters", or "as banking falters".
it's a little tricky with the labels, they did mention that professional and business did the worst of all sectors and while information sector lost jobs as well, that sounds like the closest match for tech so I have reservations about the claim as well
Generally the BLS categories are hard to parse. Some major companies are software categories, others are information. But in general the "information" sector is pretty heavy on newspapers, books, and film as well. And search engines etc have their own categories.
Would you be able to guess without looking what top-level category contains Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, or Google?
It is only two weeks ago the commissioner of labor statistics got fired and going forward one needs to be very sceptical about the integrity of numbers or statistics coming from the official US government resources. How can anyone at this point trust any US statistics?
Serious question: who is producing reliable numbers now? The Trump administration is actively suppressing federal reporting and openly threatening to cease collecting and reporting data,
and this is absolutely signaling to sycophants and supporters that they should falsify or withhold unflattering data.
> WHICH IS A HUGE REASON WHY TRUMP IS ASKING FOR RATES TO COME DOWN!!!!! The guy freaking knows business, whether your little minds can accept it or not, the people in charge right now actually are trying to fix this crap.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.*
> The implication was that, going forwards, the numbers would be more accurately calculated in order to reflect REALITY of US employment, which is far bleaker than any of us really wishes to accept, myself included!
Ok, would that imply that if the jobs numbers are not worse in the next couple of reports and instead, are suspiciously higher then the administration is in fact cooking the books?
H1B visas are not going to help the situation. The reality is our corporate structure lobbies for legislation that lowers wages through various means and is quite effective at doing it.
There is definitely hiring going on, but having seen this now from the hiring manager side, companies are flooded with candidates because of all the tech layoffs.
So yes, companies are hiring, but it’s hard to get hired right now because of the volume of candidates.
In my anecdotal experience hiring has been picking up but it seems that everyone expects the 2021 ZIRP economy where new grads were getting $200-300k offers with easy interviews. The experienced hire market is now back to where we were in 2015-2016 and new hire market slightly lagging behind. Unfortunately a lot of people will have to be comfortable working for non tech companies in tech roles like 10 years ago. It sucks because the living standards are more expensive than 10 years ago.
I'm not seeing many jobs in my area for non-tech companies. The non-tech company is working for is outsourcing to India. I might be getting terminated soon and expect I will end up working retail. Nobody wants early career generalists.
Unless you can provide some evidence for that, it seems like pretty plain BS. The issues with outsourcing/offshoring were never the kind that can be solved with AI.
I believe you have it backwards, the future is having high wage devs use AI. Imagine a world where a single high wage devs with lots of experience can oversee say 10 AI agents. The boilerplate and grunt work can be taken care of by the agents and the human can refine the results as they know better than the AI and where the AI went wrong.
If you stick a low experience human in front of an AI the human does not know if the AI is spewing nonsense and therefore sometimes you will get nonsense from the process.
I got my first (and only; I changed careers) tech job in 2014. I only learned years later that 2014 was considered a "down" year for the industry. The "job market" exists at the margins. If you're good, you get hired.
In the long term. But in the long term we're all dead.
I only have one social media account, LinkedIn, and I have that account because I wanted to help people that got laid off from the company I worked for who were good, but were definitely not getting hired in 2008. There were developers who were top notch, but they weren't getting hired, they were sitting there not working getting poorer, frustrated and divorced.
I'm on my last job so I have no idea what the job market is like now, don't know don't care, but no. There are times when even the best developers can't even get a phone interview.
This is why you should live below your means and save money when times are good. It's very possible, especially in the tech industry to get to a position where you can comfortably ride out a few years of a crappy job market
Or peripheral to it, e.g. data engineering for pre-training data or a joint DE/ML role, etc. Sometimes the scale (petabyte) or specific stack experience is a barrier.
Anyone talking about CA saying "oh, how can they be redistricting" should STFU and direct their ire at Texas and Trump. They started this, demanding this completely irregular mid-decade redistricting, so I for one am thrilled the Dems are finally growing a pair and fighting back.
IMO it's far too early for "AI" to have had a meaningful effect on Software company hiring. A more plausible explanation for me is that between roughly 2012 and 2022, there was a tremendous increase in the supply of SWE talent (via undergraduate CS programs massively increasing enrollment, boot camps, immigration, etc), fueled primarily by ZIRP. On the demand side, ZIRPy VC funding primarily went to bullshit Crypto and (to a lesser extent) bullshit Metaverse companies, most of which have not panned out, meaning there is a dearth of late stage and newly public companies to hire said talent.
I agree with all of this, coupled with a decent amount of layoffs from the Mag7s, though I'm not sure how distributed those were in California, necessarily.
And old unicorns like airbnb and uber now having to compete with traditional hotels and taxis again.
I think Elon's takeover of twitter set something of a precedent too: if he could reduce headcount as much as he did and still have a functioning product, then why can't I?
BTW I also don't think it has much to do with that engineering tax deferral code change that people keep talking about. My cynical hunch is that that topic keeps getting seeded by the billionaires who have the most to gain by reversing it, and hey maybe they'll hire an extra engineer or two afterward just to be good sports, but it's not going to reverse any major employment trends.
Your cynical hunch is very much wrong. That change was easier to swallow on massive capitalization than for smaller businesses.
Yeah, actually it looks like you're right about the tax code impacts. Doesn't seem like it'd be causing layoffs just yet though, but could definitely be putting hiring on pause due to the uncertainty.
It doesn't have to be either-or. I think there are a bunch of factors all contributing to the current state of developer job market:
1. Rise of remote work: sure, it was there in some form. But prior to 2020, state of the remote work tools was abysmal. The prevalent culture was also about hiring the whole teams. After covid, remote work tools are far better. And companies learned to onboard one new remote hire at a time which over time is now allowing them to replace US workers with cheap overseas ones at a manageable pace.
2. end of cheap money - if the risk free rate is 4-5%, the demand from risky ventures like software startups is going to go up. So funding has dried up at the margins.
3. rise in the discount rate - related to the previous point, the discount rate one applies to investments have gone up. That means startups valued at 1B are now valued only at a few hundred millions. So to avoid down or flat rounds, startups have to cut costs drastically and show profitability to justify a higher valuation. Cue all the job cuts, belt tightening and death marches with a skeleton crew.
4. rise of AI - AI is helping with productivity of coding and non-coding tasks. It is also acting as an excuse for #3 when laying people off.
In my experience, all these are meaningful factors for the abysmal state of the developer market.
Definitely agree that it's not mutually exclusive, however I think 4 is likely orders of magnitude less impactful than the others...so far. Which isn't to say the effects won't start to magnify soon.
I think most of the trends we are seeing started around 2022, but if AI delivers on its promise things may accelerate in the coming years.
not true. If you see companies like microsoft, salesforce etc., they are selling AI to replace all sales, support, marketing, developer ... jobs.
AI is a big factor.
They're selling the promise of AI, not the real deal (yet)
Biotech is facing a huge downturn right now too.
That's a poster child of a casualty of ZIRP. Hard to imagine an industry any longer duration and hungry for cheap risk.
I'm not sure about the thesis that this is primarily fallout from free money and suppressed interest rates though. That was really a '22 story, and even with long and variable lags, that element has been in play for a while now.
Oversupply of talent definitely sounds like a good argument though. I'll posit there has been some disruption by recent developments in the industry. Also, while metaverse and crypto startups may be passe, the AI scene has disgusting amounts of hype and money, and crypto ain't dead either, which brings me back to the earlier point that I do think some disruption is there to fill the gap in the narrative.
For people I talk, it is the end of ZIRP that caused it. ZIRP ended in April 2022.
Even as interest rates went up the VCs still had committed funds to distribute for a year to 18 months. Then the biotechs had runway for 1-2 years from that. Now that’s all gone, and they can’t raise their next series. In the meantime, C> plus synbio is recently having a lower win rate than hoped for.
That plus all the money that is there is all going to AI companies due to the shorter time to return / higher potential roic / hype.
Zero Interest Rate (monetary) Policy targets short-term interest rates at or near 0% to stimulate economic growth via extremely cheap borrowing, to encourage spending / investing / risk-taking
My anecdata - the large tech company I work for has practically stopped hiring. I went from conducting interviews practically every week in the first quarter to none at all on the post 3 months. Even during the layoffs on 2022 they were still hiring for some positions, so I conducted around 1-2 interviews a month.
I'm literally one of the last software engineers my company (in the Bay area) ever hired. I've been here for 2 years and only 1 engineer joined since then, meanwhile dozens left.
Same in mine - started off as 800, had a salary freeze for a year, had a hiring freeze for now 2 years and after layoffs and people leaving we’re now at 480
What if this turns into rust belt but for software? Once high paying jobs gone with AI, politicians trying to please grumpy software developers promising them to open a software shop and create jobs. Mostly college drop-outs, voting for a certain party that promises to take on AI :)
Half kidding of course, but AFAIK many industries went through such a transformation and today most social and political issues stem from those areas that once were affluent lost their industries. Why not the software too?
We are giving India the IT market, just like China got manufacturing.
It's precisely this. Trump is allowing one of the last vestiges of the American middle class to be outsourced to India. Just like Clinton allowed the same to happen with factory jobs to China.
As a person of color this is even more detestable.
At least we will be able to get jobs putting plastic forks in boxes now. Maybe we will be able to use those green GitHub tiles to negotiate better pay.
As a person of grayscale the contrast is undeniable.
You Grayscale people have it easy, at least you have contrast. As a person of Transparency I end up overlooked everywhere all the time.
Right, it was Trump who allowed IT services to be outsourced for the last two decades.
I mean... yeah? Tim Cook and Trump were documented buddies in the first term of his presidency. No over-the-table attacks over offshored manufacturing or outsourced services. They probably celebrated the demise of Intel over a filet mignon and Coca-Cola while discussing the merits of lower manufacturing margins.
The idea that now Trump (or anyone, for that matter) wants to bail-out American chipmaking is laughable. Intel bet wrong, and now all of America has to satisfy itself with being critically reliant on Taiwan for our highest-margin products. You don't have to blame Trump, but there's no reason any corrective action shouldn't have been done during the first term. We either let Intel drown or send them a government-issued life raft - we can't teach them to swim from underwater.
Actually it was Nixon who single-handedly pushed manufacturing to China, and Reagan who pushed harder.
Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.
IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.
not my downvote btw
"No More Offshore. Startups Look to Spend and Hire in U.S. Due to Trump Tax Change."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-startups-hiring-us-workers-30f...
I don't understand how Trump is allowing anything with headline like this.
The BBB fixed some previously dire flaws in how tax law treated spending on software salaries in the US.
Create the problem. Fix the problem. Win!
The other side did have 4 years to fix it, though.
I do wonder if the last election would have gone differently if all the people directly and indirectly affected by that hadn't been.
> The other side did have 4 years to fix it, though.
They did try, incorporating some relief into a bill in 2021, however:
> In the House version of the Build Back Better Act passed in November 2021, the effective date for the amendment made by the TCJA to Section 174 was delayed until tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. While this specific provision of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support, comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) in late December indicating his opposition to the bill effectively stalled progress on the Build Back Better Act, making the path forward on legislation unclear.
-- https://www.bdo.com/insights/tax/significant-change-to-the-t...
That bill did narrowly survive, but only in a stripped-down form with that Section-174 provision removed to satisfy the Senate fence-sitters. Manchin later left the Democratic party.
And as a white person it’s even more detestable still.
Since skin color somehow matters /s
[flagged]
Worse because we're giving it to India in the US.
I've been saying this on HN since 2022:
For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?
For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.
Our company only uses teams in eastern europe. The cost is 1/3 the salary of someone in the US.
Remote work during covid improved remote management and communication, which is needed to fully outsource workers.
I live in Canada and most skilled developers self-sort into the American market as it's a 2x salary differential.
Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.
I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.
It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...
Canadians self-sort into the US because of money. If they could earn the same amount working from Canada, almost none would pack up their lives and move to a new country.
I don't think it's this simple. Maybe it would be for larger corporations that would rather hire more cheap staff than fewer quality staff. You shouldn't have this issue if the company values the experience the staff has instead of just looking at them as an expense.
I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.
Any hints on which company this is?
https://facepunch.com/careers
So bizarre to hear stuff like this said as if it's a future hypothetical.
Outsourcing dev work to India because it's "cheaper" has already maximally happened since decades ago.
So if your theory was correct there'd be almost no western developers by now. And yet there they are, making half a million a year working for big tech in California.
The only way your position can pass even a basic sense check is that you mean you think these companies are paying 5x just to see their devs in person?
A (large) fraction of software development is outsourced to India for years if not decades but it jumped with the end of ZIRP. Outsourcing has downsides but the difference of salaries is also a part of the equation.
It'll be interesting to see the affect of AI on this. My guess is it'll actually reverse the pattern somewhat since the amount of manual work is reduced and thereby the premium on fast and clearly-understood comms has increased.
Hard to predict. In the areas I know well LLM don’t improve my productivity that much but they allow me to do something in areas I don’t know well e.g. write code in an unfamiliar language (likely bad code but sometimes that better than nothing). So maybe juniors + LLM will replace middle level developers.
Job market is better for seniors right now but that’s mostly because employers can sometimes hire a senior for money they would pay to a junior during late COVID boom.
Yes, but the claim `aurareturn made was that it was for the WFH/remote people being remote, and not as a function of ZIRP ending
Remote work increases the percentage of jobs that can be given to people living in other countries. It’s not that 100% of jobs can be outsourced.
Every software job I’ve had for over a decade has had at least one employee on the team working in a different office or from home. Frequently different time zones. This was already a reality and as the other guy in the thread said, we’ve already seen maximal outsourcing.
>So what if the guy works night and sleep days
is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of
Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve
The fact that only one member was remote caps the remote availability.
I feel like this supports my theory.
Nowhere in my story was there the implication that there was only 1 remote employee at that time because there was a cap on remote employees.
You also get into the grey area of if it counts as a remote team if every member of the team is located in a different regional office.
It has been a gradual change.
> already maximally happened since decades ago
We just laid off ~4000 employees and are replacing them with hiring in India. Your notion that it already happened decades ago is wrong.
Nope, this is a well known pattern. Western startup, grows, matures, MBAs take over, all they can do is look at cost numbers because they can't value anything, so send all the jobs to lowest bidder overseas, look at this sudden jump in profits! Surely we now all deserve fat bonuses. Get those bonuses, quietly move on to other jobs, company enters descent phase, new startups have since started eating into their markets, they've no way to respond because they're corpse-companies, slowly get consolidated and cannibalized and Toys-R-Us-d into the ground.
Cycle of life continues
Whether you work from home or not does not change the fact that the work can be done remotely. You think your boss values the watercooler chitchat so much they would really pass on hiring someone at 1/5 of your salary working harder than you?
The return to office mandates were mostly a power play and a cost saving measure.
Why does Google hire anyone anywhere for half of their positions, when they could just literally not hire anyone and get the same amount of production code without wasting everyone’s time? It is absolutely not as simple as you seem to believe.
I also have been saying this and was shocked to see that US developers demanded WFH instead of actively trying to stop it becoming a thing. I was trying to understand what makes them believe that their company will pay them 5 to 10 times more money to sit in front of a computer somewhere outside the company rather than someone who is in the other side of the world.
USA based ones have some advantages, like the timezone and the familiarity to the culture but both of these things are actually fixable and when fixed it saves a lot of money. I came to conclusion that US based developers must be thinking that they are better than everyone and that's why they are being paid these salaries.
The space I work in, which I don’t plan to leave, is hardware/software/embedded. I am hybrid, and sometimes I go in twice a month. When trying to integrate hardware into a system over a software interface (CAN, various serial, i2c, eth, etc) I am on-site daily.
Then integrating a whole subsystem into the actual product, same deal. I spend as much time holding a wrench or a meter as I do writing code.
This is very hard to outsource.
I skipped the whole webdev movement. Closest I got was using Wt (C++) to make an engineering interface for a system once, so non-engineers could actuate relays and devices.
I do think I’m better than most people at this. I don’t think it can be outsourced, and I am not concerned.
People can argue about the latest js framework or how amazing rust is for the next 15 years, at which point I plan on retiring.
This type of work is largely recession-proof and offshoring-proof.
If it can be done more cheaply then some competitor will do it and kill your business that doesn’t. Either find another competitive edge (be better or convince somehow the customers that you deserve the premium you ask for), or do what Trump does, introduce tarrifs for imports and cutoff the more more efficient companies from reaching the local market. And of course pay the price for it.
The rust belt can't really fall back on tourism like California can. Worst case scenario all software jobs evaporate and it becomes Florida with better weather
LA has a highly diverse economy, it’s really only the Bay Area that has diversification issues.
The rust belt actually does quite well with tourism, though my research for responding to your comment seems to indicate to me that tourism is important everywhere.
Back in the 90s, it was the opposite as miliary/aerospace declined in SoCal.
I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.
I’m over in the rust belt and all I hear about California these days is it’s full of homeless people and crime that goes unchecked. It’s not looking as appealing as a vacation destination as it did 20 years ago. Maybe this perception doesn’t match the reality you see living there, but when it comes to attracting tourists, perception is everything.
It's really hard to reply without making a statement on politics but you really should diversify your news consumption.
I can only assume you think I’m watching Fox News all day. Here is an article from CNN[0] which talks about the significant number of stores closing in a popular tourist area, and while they try to explain all the reasons for it, homeless people (sorry, “unhoused populations”) and crime are still mentioned. It also mentions California has 30% of the counties unhoused, which is way higher than I thought it would be and paints an even worse picture than the one I had.
This article is a couple years old, so maybe things have started to turn around from the investments that were made, but reputations take time to change, as good news doesn’t get reported on nearly as often as bad news.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/business/san-francisco-union-...
Unfortunately, if you live in a different country, it’s quite difficult. The only news coming from the USA are the shocking ones. All news organisations are like this. I didn’t hear anything else about for example California in the past decades in European news, just these:
- Schwarzenegger - Homelessness - Fires
Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.
And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.
But of course that’s true for every single country.
Unlike Florida, a state known for its orderly and mannered citizens. I think CA will be fine
I'll take "lawless" California over seeing the same Rankin cop watching a stop sign at the entrance to Braddock in order to write "rolling stop" tickets every 15 minutes. I also like that I don't have to worry about a police chief holding me at gunpoint because the fire alarm happened to go off while I was alone in a warehouse space that I was renting.
I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.
There are plenty of dying places in the desert and on the beach tourists can visit, it's just the "dying places" part that makes them aversive to tourism.
Everywhere has a boom-bust cycle. The question is just on what timeline. It typically takes decades to happen. When is anyone's guess.
Not always. Some industries just never come back. Where is the oil lamp or camera film industry now?
The lamp industry didn't go anywhere. The Camera industry didn't go anywhere. Might as well be saying, where has the CRT monitor or Macromedia Flash industry now?
I think defining industries this narrowly isn’t helpful
Haha so true. Though I feel for this to happen the cost of building software products has to be high. With manufacturing your average mechanical eng grad cannot build something and sell (factories' costs etc) out the gate.
With software any body can build and put something out there (ignoring quality and tech debt and taste etc). Where software might go the way of manufacturing is when price of ai actually reflects hardware costs (my estimates of the realistic Claude max pricing at cost is between 7-10k and month). Now put together other structures that will come up to "industrialize" ai+software software may not have easy entries sadly.
> What if this turns into rust belt
We're rewriting the belt.
Ah ha!
> Why not the software too?
Would it be any worse than the Dot-com bust?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Literally no jobs are going away due to AI.
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.
Well, I moved into a more conservative role, which I think was a good move considering the economy and the job market.
This is easily, demonstrably false. The Washington Post ran an article over 2 years ago of specific, documented instances where people lost their jobs due to ChatGPT: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...
As per your article:
“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”
I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.
There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI
Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.
When a manager prefers AI over a proven-performing employee, I would expect a lot if times it is becuse the AI is more intelligent than the manager, not the employee.
Looking at things in the micro scale and expecting it to translate directly into a macro scale is stupidity.
Maybe you should say that directly to the grandparent comment who did that.
Sure, in total probably there will be even more and better jobs. Just like with the auto industry or the other industries that turned from producing stuff into designing stuff and telling to Chinese to produce it like this.
That's not the whole picture. There are less positions available where you tell someone else what to do and more competition for those positions.
Define “jobs.” A lot of the “jobs” created by offshoring production involved being service workers for the 25% of knowledge workers who benefit from offshoring.
AI has already replaced thousands of jobs. Plenty of stories about that appear on HN. Plenty of anecdotes from people who have lost work or clients to AI. People here have stated their intention to fire their entire workforce and replace them with AI as soon as possible. AI companies have put up billboards saying "stop hiring humans." A single Google search would disabuse you of this notion.
I don't understand being this willfully naive, especially if you support AI, because using it to replace jobs is the entire selling point. No company wants AI for any other reason, and every company wants AI.
Of course there will be. There will be instances where a company has 4 people working in a role but with AI 2 people can do the same job and they can therefore let 2 people go. (and then there will be other places where even more jobs are created because of AI).
This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.
If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.
How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?
> How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?
Not op, but…
Just because a company is profitable doesn’t mean that they make good decisions around hiring.
You are assuming human resources are hired based on budget only instead of need. Your assumption is: "we have 400,000$ to spend on something. Oh okay let's spend them on hiring 4 engineers at 100k each" and with AI they just happen to be as efficient as 8 engineers. Yay. They'll just do more things.
This might be the case at startups.
For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go". In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.
Art jobs got destroyed everything else AI was just a excuse
The word “literally” is doing a LOT of work here.
"Jobs going away due to AI" really tracks two different outcomes:
- The type of job is eliminated due to AI
- The amount of people doing a type of job is substantially reduced because AI increases the productivity of people in that role and companies can do the same amount of that work with less people
I think the former is extremely limited so far, but the latter is pretty substantial. I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the people that did probably did so to reject the former argument.
The most common one is simply we wanted to cut heads and used ai as an excuse. Also AI spend is probably a huge drag on a lot of companies that are getting nothing off value but burning a lot
helpdesk
[flagged]
What is wrong with this comment section.
Racism? Lack of social awareness? Problems with impulse control? Trolling? Pick several.
Mostly it's comprised of people angry with their lives and people in them, who need a quick cheap external target to rail against as a vent for that anger.
That's why you see so much aggressive black-white positions, nit-picking, and wording that intentionally floats just below the rule-breaking line of outright calling the other person a moron or piece of s---.
What’s with the comments here? Forget the official reports, we should ask a couple randos on HN about their inboxes?
After reading the article it looks like the attribution is defensible:
"In contrast, professional and business services were down 7,100 jobs in July, the worst of any sector, and the tech-heavy information sector lost 1,000 jobs."
This could be many things. People could be leaving to do their own startups. The BLS counts that as a job loss thus high-velocity sectors can be reported as job loss.
People leaving to do their own startups would be a pretty small portion of the job market, even on the SF Bay area.
right, upon further research, there's no corresponding increase in LLC or EIN filings so the startup hypothesis is likely unsupported
In all fairness, plenty of people leaving the trappings of Big Tech are pretty capable of uprooting and doing business elsewhere; California offers relatively little other than what it has from existing inertia.
Agglomeration effects are real. Research has constantly shown that people working in high productivity area generate more wealth than the same people working outside high productivity areas.
The real problem, IMO, is that workers in the tech industry have voluntarily destroyed these agglomeration benefits by using the short period of power workers had during/after the pandemic to insist on work from home instead of better worker protections.
As a result, it’s very possible that high productivity areas in the U.S. are no longer that, and remote work has reduced all Americana’s productivity, making it impossible to justify the higher cost of living and salaries in big cities.
I dunno. I wish I could find places outside California like Iowa City or St Louis appealing, a simple million will get you a mansion with like fountains, a guest house, pool, tennis courts... In SF that's a two bedroom condo
Except climate. I was on a road trip this summer and stayed in Iowa City while driving East and then St Louis driving West. Downtown Iowa City was appealing. I had a good hotel at a bargain price near the St Louis airport although the area was not the best.
But it was hot. My time back in coastal California has been mostly in the 70s. Camping in Marin County this week, the high was in the 60s. Refreshing after heat warnings in Nebraska, Illinois and Ontario.
The majority of “SF” tech works in the South Bay that has plenty of 100f days. Also almost all the condos there have thin walls and no AC. So that means 80f all night in your $3000/mo 3rd floor crap box.
I do agree there is no winter in the SF bay though. That’s pretty nice.
Agreed about jobs in the South Bay. I commuted from Midpeninsula southward for 30 years.
100 degrees is unusual although it happens. I never lived in the South Bay so can't speak about AC. My house, built in 1947, didn't have it. It was a pain, maybe 2 weeks of the year, at most. It was in the 50s, most days of the year. Low at night in the summer, high in the winter.
I had early guidance that the climate was mild and I would live in a smaller house than I was used to but I would be outside all year. Check.
I didn't understand that there are only two seasons: spring when it rained sometimes and summer when it didn't rain but might be foggy in the morning.
My first year, I craved the rain after six months without. I've adjusted although the first seasonal rain is enjoyable like the first snow in the Midwest. But I don't miss the next 6 months of Midwest winter.
BLS includes a household survey. It's not just based on payrolls. They aim to capture as much as possible about people with informal work or self-employment.
Provided folks give some context about their location, experience, search, etc the input can be helpful - averages are great but aren't super instructive about one's own odds.
Plus BLS household survey probably has some non-response bias from it re: high income, low time individuals, precisely the folks chiming in.
Well, you survey 4400/13500000, the rando inbox is adding quite a bit to the sample size
We're littreally reading stories upvoted in importance by a bunch of randos. What else do you expect?
True ...
Are we sure its just tech? Isn't the entertainment industry going through a rough time right now as well?
I have a Teamster friend here in LA, and according to him practically nothing is being filmed in this area. The major studios are opting to film either out of state (Georgia) or in Canada.
I just noticed tonight that the movie theaters in my city closed up July 27--there's already weeds growing up out front. This was a really depressing epiphany because the mall next door is basically dead, too. I feel like 2020 killed this place but it's been a delayed reaction, same as my tech career. All we have now here in the upper midwest are people wandering around wearing outfits more suited to the desert conditions of Africa and I guess they don't go to the movies, so...
Over 50% of h1b visas issued in tech went to indian h1b's - no it's not an issue that's equivalent in the entertainment industry.
Time to start holding businesses accountable for pushing the cheaper labor option. Many of those on visas are biased toward those from their own cultural heritage as well.
Those businesses own all the social media, all the search engines, all the apps people discuss things on, and all the politicians.
> Many of those on visas are biased toward those from their own cultural heritage as well.
It’s not even “bias.” It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own. “It’s okay to be unfair to white people because they don’t need it like we do.”
I make the clarification because I’ve noticed it even among people who don’t have in-group bias. My mom quite dislikes other Bangladeshis, but only slowly realized over 30 years of living here that there are white-majority parts of the country with real economic challenges.
I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?
If its the former, I am not sure what you are trying to convey.
For myself - seasoned engineer, european pursuasion, I want to work with people that are open and collaborative. I've worked with backgrounds like mine I would never work with again.
I do have an issue with employers find an excuse to bias towards the lower cost labor pool that is H1s. And when teams get saturated that way, it perpetuates the same.
These days, I have found large companies with a tech component and smaller companies within tech centers are more diverse/inclusive (as you will) than the FAANG type companies.
> I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?
It’s hard to articulate because it’s more an absence of thought. Imagine robots run the world and tell humans what to do. You wouldn’t really think about the robots, and you wouldn’t think about their material interests. That’s kind of like how many desis view white people.
For example, consider the domination of the motel industry by Gujrati Patels: https://madrascourier.com/insight/how-gujarati-patels-took-o.... I suspect they don’t think of themselves as being “biased” by favoring other Gujratis. They don’t think about fairness to white people because why would you think about fairness towards your robot overlords?
Ok, I think what you are meaning is a certain cultural sect / group / region dominating. White supremacists, for me is a different meaning because, history. So I think I understand the cultural comparison.
If I am understanding right, you are not wrong. A group gets a manager of a certain cultural background (visa or not), the team hiring practice trends that way. Companies do not question this...They should.
Diversity in age, culture, ethnic background and experience build a better team.
The unfortunate thing is there are a few cultures that benefit from H1 visas (most prevalent) and propagate their leanings over being open.
American companies should be doing more to hire non-H1s, there is not a talent shortage, but they would rather not pay that additional percentage.
> It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own.
This is also an interesting way to explain the self-immolating Whites, which nowadays is most of us. Any sort of White group identity or collective interest is absolute heresy which must be opposed, while all things in the collective interest of non-Whites must be celebrated, encouraged, and helped along at our own expense. There's a certain paternalistic arrogance to it, an ethnocentric assumption that other races can't get on without us. And it's much more common and pervasive than the caricature of the like shaved head neo-Nazi we are all expected to imagine exists in large numbers, somewhere.
Absolutely. One time, I was explaining to this lady about immigration: that, if the shoe were on the other foot, folks from Bangladesh would’ve shut down the border long ago. She hissed at me: “well, we’re not Bangladesh!” White Americans are supposed to be above having normal human attachments to soil, kin, and clan.
Bangladesh border is quite open with lot of influx from refugees in Myanmar - of course some people there too don’t like it .
That's right. You see this aspect of the situation clearly.
anecdata: after lay off 10 months ago, I suddenly got 3 offers in July and I am employed now.
I think it's the BBB that fixed the tax code issue - just a guess.
With respect to chronology and cause/effect, I'd point out that provision took effect in January 2022, so it's been of-concern for a while.
It was put into law in 2017 with the Republican TCJA, but section 174 was time-delayed, part of a general trick of having all of the tax-cuts and spending immediately, with any budget "balancing" items deferred as long as possible.
I and a few thousand of my colleagues were laid off that day.
> With respect to chronology and cause/effect, I'd point out that provision took effect in January 2022,
That's when the layoff spree started!
Why didn't the Democrats who were in power repeal it by Jan 2022 by itself or as part of other large bills they passed?
Among other possible attempts(?) that touched on the issue, here's one in 2024 that Republicans blocked in the Senate, where they "filibustered" it by voting "nay" on cloture.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/118-2024/s230
> Why didn't the Democrats
Alternate question: Why didn't the Republicans do something in the years before 2025 to fix the problem they created and which tech-company lobbyists absolutely told them about?
That wasn't a clean bill, it had a bunch of other stuff in it, 86 pages long.
Democrats could've passed a bill that only included the repeal of the R&D changes, which they didn't coz they didn't want to.
Edit: rate limited coz of politically motivated downvotes, I am done here.
> Edit: rate limited coz of politically motivated downvotes, I am done here.
This is not how HN works. I posted an explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920494.
> Democrats could've
This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story, where Republicans are somehow never to blame because they're just toddlers or forces of nature, while Democrats are always at fault because they didn't stop the Republicans from burning the house down or clean up all the poop from the carpets or whatever, in an endless and impossible race.
By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
> That wasn't a clean bill
Well, that one happens to be a bill from a Republican, I was just looking for ones that affected that tax-provision.
In any case, did you check out the table-of-contents, and not just the page-length? It may not be as minimal-as-possible, but it's all tax-related stuff.
> This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story
Because only Democrats had agency when the law took effect? The president can veto any bill. Democrats passed two bills in 2021 and 2022 with zero Republican votes, zero, they could've easily included the repeal in those bills if they wanted to. They didn't coz they didn't want to, their stated policy is to raise taxes on corporations, how is this even debatable? Meanwhile the Republicans at that time had no agency. Once they got agency, they repealed it immediately, with zero Democrat votes.
Would you similarly blame the Democrats for all voting against the repeal as part of the BBB that just passed? You wouldn't and your reason would be "but the BBB contained a lot of other things apart from this repeal that the dems didn't like". Why won't you apply the same logic to the non-clean bill you brought up?
> By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
Huh, they fixed it immediately after coming to power. They couldn't fix it before the BBB because it needed to go in reconciliation because the dems don't suppor the repeal. They didn't fix it in 2019 because it wasn't even in effect yet and IIRC dems had the house. So how does the partisan vengeance allegation even make any sense?
> because the dems don't suppor the repeal.
What evidence led you to that conclusion? It feels like there's some Fundamental Attribution Error [1] going on here, where Republicans are getting a free-pass for the pain they created "because there were circumstances" (which is true) but somehow Democrats failing to remove the pain is automatically "because they wanted it that way."
I already shared some opposing evidence, that Republican-sponsored Senate bill with a repeal in it that still garnered strong (but not unanimous) Democratic support.
Here's another: Section-174 relief was originally included in the 2021 "Build Back Better" act, but--due to those tight partisan vote margins--a particular conservative-leaning Democrat (who later left the party!) decided to prevent it [0]:
> With the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) being all but dead in the Senate after Joe Manchin’s unexpected rejection of the bill, concerns remain high regarding the future of Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code. [...] But, with Senator Manchin’s refusal to support the BBBA, the legislation is now on its last breath, although the Biden administration remains optimistic that there is a chance of getting a modified version of the bill passed.
[0] https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/uncertainty-co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
> What evidence led you to that conclusion?
They controlled the Senate and the Presidency, and never allowed a clean bill(one introduced by Marco Rubio which was killed in the Dem controlled Senate committee) that restored the exception to come to vote. The Republicans came to power and immediately restored it, with zero Democrat votes.
86 pages is not long by today's standards. Also, when was the last "clean bill" passed?
I was under the impression that big bills are more beautiful and thus preferred
It wouldn't have been budget-neutral without a bunch of tax increases along with it which they don't have the spine to implement.
It had Republican support so they could've easily gotten the 60 votes in the Senate, so it didn't need to be budget-neutral.
Because it was intended to offset losses in tax revenue from the 2017 tax cuts, and trying to undo those tax cuts would have been political suicide.
Crimethink
I was laid off this year and also saw a massive uptick in offers in July. Based in Colorado, but was looking nation wide and I got more interest out of SF than the rest of the country combined.
Sounds like you're one of the lucky ones. In my experience, remote tech jobs have largely moved to India. It's like pulling teeth at my company to get them to offer a remote job in a NA timezone (US or Canada).
anecdata: I run a saas product and my primary customers are recruiters, after the BBB I have had more daily signups and new subscribers than previous months.
Partially! The text of the OBBBA actually made permanent the section of the tax code that treats software development as research and amortizes accordingly. However, because nothing can just be straightforward, it also allows domestic research expenses to be deducted immediately instead of amortized.
Definitely a much better tax situation but also not one we would've been in if not for the TCJA, and we still have an exposed oblique (the removal of the domestic research exclusion) that could put us back in the same spot unless the software development as research section is removed.
less recruiter activity than a few months ago, cleared one interview gauntlet just to have the role change due to a new lead hire, otherwise getting followups for screens but hit or miss on the tech assessments. might have to spend more time practicing. 10 yoe, SFBA.
sorry to hear that, keep it up, it was absolutely demoralizing for me during those 10 months I started to believe I was actually losing my mind after a literal 20 year history in startups/tech.
But my colleagues are all younger than me - they are hiring people out of college too, so you can make it just keep pushing
I'm not looking for work, but have a LinkedIn that I honestly forgot about until the end of July. It'd been so long since I got even recruiterspam I forgot about it. And out of nowhere, 2 or 3 target recruiter messages.
Hopefully things are looking up for the market.
This might be the only good thing in all of BBB
Good... for tech workers, and tech companies.
That’s quite the leap there.
But not a surprise based on your history here on HN.
Ah yes, the BBB that fixed the rules that trump changed last time.
Why didn't the Biden admin "fix" the rule before it took effect in Jan 2022? They passed several bills, they could've have included the repeal. It took effect on the democrats watch, because of their inaction.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
The Democrat controlled Senate blocked it from coming to a vote.
Why does HN always blame only Republicans for this change?
Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
The democrats were elected to undo the damage caused in Trump's first term. And they let the damage start and happen on their watch, because.. according to you, for the sake of political benefit while ordinary people suffered and are still suffering from losing and not getting jobs. They will probably do the same again if they're elected, intentionally keep things broken for political gains. It's sad to see people support and encourage such behavior.
If you passed it in the first place, and counted on repealing it before it would have taken effect, and failed to do so, then I blame you for passing it in the first place.
Why wouldn't you also blame the Democrats though?
They had the chance to repeal it before it would have taken effect.
Why do they get zero blame on here?
I have no problem blaming them. The biggest problem with Democrats is that they cede all their power to Republicans, and don't seem to use the power they have when they have it. You can have the best policy positions ever but you still suck if you can't capitalize on wins.
But the Republicans made this change to start with. That's a lot of blame. And if they did it just to create a political firestorm against Democrats later (which is exactly what they did), do we (A) recognize that politicians shouldn't be using Americans as cannon fodder to damage their political enemies or (B) blame their political enemies?
Because insistence on blaming both sides equally when one side clearly caused the issue enabled republicans for far too long.
It gives advantage to bad actors.
Dems were elected to undo damage. They chose not to because their platform is higher taxes on corporations and high earners, and ended up creating the tech downturn on their watch. Republicans came in and immediately reversed it with zero Democrats support.
Nice try. No. Republicans caused it. Full stop.
Both sides are the same, Republicans destroy things and Democrats are not perfect in stopping and fixing them! "I am gonna support Republicans as they create problems and then blame Democrats" just makes you someone who intentionally creates problems.
Dems had the chance to fix it and intentionally did not. Republicans did it immediately once they had the chance. If Dems weren't elected in 2020 we'd have plenty of tech jobs now. Their fault, full stop. If Kamala was elected, her platform was even higher corporate taxes.
It's possible you need a supermajority or something to specifically "undo" laws passed by a previous session of congress - something Biden did not have.
In the Senate specifically you need 60 votes to break a filibuster. Filibustering, if we Americans remember from Civics/US Govt class in high school, happens when a senator exercises their right to speak for as long as they wish. Or at least it used to. There was a rule change a few decades ago to allow something called a “pocket filibuster” where you don’t have to keep speaking but you can block further motions on the matter. This requires at least 60 votes to break, so it’s effectively impossible to do anything in the Senate without that many votes now.
There were some legendary filibusters back in the day. One famous example was when Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights act by speaking for 24 hours continuously. He was not able to block the bill by continuing to speak because there are limits to how long someone is able to stand and deliver, and originally if you stopped speaking you had to yield the floor and allow business to proceed.
Republicans supported the repeal, so 60 votes in the Senate were possible if the Dems wanted to repeal it. They didn't want to, coz they passed two reconciliation bills with zero republican votes and could've included the repeal in either one of them. Their policy is explicitly to tax corporations more. They didn't even let the clean repeal bills have a vote.
> Republicans supported the repeal
of the statute they wrote, voted for, and signed into law. Important note.
It has been a common tactic to work around the filibuster and reconciliation rules, and to repeal them later. They didn't expect the democrats to oppose the repeal so hard and destroy tech jobs on their watch. They know no one will ever blame them for it, like you can see on HN. Democrats platform is all about higher taxes on corps so that tracks with their actions, jobs be damned.
Then how did Republicans repeal it just recently with zero Dem votes?
Repealing it had Republican support during the Biden term too, they even introduced a bill in2023 to repeal it which the Democrats killed.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
Democrats really wanted the changes to take place since their platform is all about higher taxes on companies and high earners.
They actually did NOT repeal the portion relevant to software development being considered research - it was actually made permanent and is pretty trivial to find by searching for "software development" against the text of the bill. What did change was an additional section to how research is capitalized, with domestic research being able to deduct immediately while other (i.e. foreign) research is subject to the amortization rules.
There are special rules called reconciliation that allow one party to pass a bill with just a majority. It can be used only once a year (hence why everything was packed into the big beautiful bill) and there are very complex and technical rules around what it can be used for.
So to answer your question, Republicans repealed it with zero Democratic votes because they included it in the once-a-year reconciliation bill. The bill that you are linking to would not have met this criteria.
It had Republican support so it would've gotten the 60 votes in Senate without needing to get reconciliation. It didn't even get a vote because the Democrats stopped it from proceeding with their control of the Senate. Their policy is all about higher taxes on corporation and high income individuals so it tracks.
> It had Republican support so it would've gotten the 60 votes in Senate without needing to get reconciliation
That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
> That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
> which the Democrats killed
Do you have a source for this claim?
The congressional record says only that it died in the Finance Committee
Democrats controlled both the Finance Committee and the Senate. There was no way for Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. So it was necessarily stopped from moving ahead by Democrats despite Republican support. Another reason for the party in power blocking the vote would if the President opposed it, to prevent the scenario of Biden having to veto.
Edit: Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts and arguments. Stay classy, HN.
> Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts
This is not how HN works. Rate-limiting only happens when an account posts high volumes of comments that break the guidelines. It's nothing to do with downvotes or the political/idological flavor of what you post (we don't care and often don't know; all we care about is whether you're filling up threads with guideline-breaking comments, which is what ruins threads).
If you want rate-limiting turned off you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we can discuss it.
This can't be correct, since the system can't detect when comments break the guidelines. It's either based on flags or downvotes, or perhaps just total number of comments. It's definitely not based on karma, since I'm rate-limited.
Another possibility is that it triggers when a moderator gets pissed at a single one of your comments.
Crapo, Republican Senator from Idaho killed the bill because he was pretending to care about deficits back then:
https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-news/crapo-criticizes-atte...
Needless to say, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the BBB’s ~$4 trillion debt increase.
That is a different bill which also restored R&E.
While it is a different bill, the fact the Democrats were fine having it in the bill passed by the House in 2024 does cast doubt on this notion that they didn't try to resolve the issue.
So that would be this Finance committee right?
> The Senate Finance Committee roster for the 118th Congress includes 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans, with three new GOP members recently appointed.
> https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/senate-finance-finalizes...
Hardly an unbeatable majority for Democrats on this committee. Especially since research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue.
> I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue
For the 10th time in this thread, the repealing bill DID NOT need to be revenue neutral since it had Republican support, all it needed was 60 votes in the Senate. Reconciliation only applies if a yearly budget bill can get at least 51 votes but not 60.
Sorry, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. I stated the same in another comment and was downvoted. I know HN is liberal biased but it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
> it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
Is this situation right now really "unusable"? Aren't you overreacting just a tad? People might disagree with you, I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation without getting upset.
> Is this situation right now really "unusable"?
Quite literally unusable because I got blocked by HN from commenting for more than two hours coz of all the politically motivated downvotes. If you have the right politics, keep commenting!
> I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation
See above, literally not able to have one because I dared to criticize Democrats for their actions and inactions that led to tech job losses for over two years.
> People might disagree with you
I'm open to arguments but looks like people disagree with the facts that I am bringing forward, so they're downvoting to suppress them to lower visibility and to discourage me from participating on here.
It's like on Reddit when you state a plain fact 'Musk founded SpaceX' in reply to a highly upvoted comment that said 'Musk bought all this companies' and get heavily downvoted and even permanently banned in large subs by highly biased moderators.
This place is turning into yet another BlueSky or Reddit where facts don't matter and only a one sided political narrative is pushed at all times. Don't think it's worth engaging. I don't want to be in a place where my comments are deemed so terrible that I get max downvoted and then unable to comment for several hours.
Ironically, such controlling behavior and shutting down of facts, criticism of one side and conversation is leading more and more people to vote for the other side. I am now ashamed of being a lifelong liberal and won't vote democrat till people change this obnoxious partisan behavior on platforms like this one.
So your opinions are unpopular and people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again?
Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
> people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again
For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.
Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
I actually addressed that in an edit to a parent post:
> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
Not sure how it addresses the fact that Democrats want higher taxes on corporations regardless of what you stated, hence they didn't act to stop this on their watch. You're just arguing that Democrats were wrong to let the R&D exception expire, which I already agree with.
Even after this recent change by Republicans, increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
> increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.
When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
> Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
No. The Democrats added a new minimum corporate tax last time they were in power. As I have to keep repeating, their policies and actions are all about taxing companies more which why they didn't repeal the R&D exemption removal. They consider it a tax loophole that companies abuse to pay less taxes.
Kamala's proposal was to increase the minimum corporate further.
No need to repeat yourself. Why are you getting so worked up? I think we'd all like to understand what the hold up was on these bills, but let's base that in supported facts, not partisanship.
As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference.
Two bills were passed with zero Republican votes in 2021 and 2022 by Democrats, the repeal could've been included in either if democrats wanted.
> As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference
There were only 27 members in the committee. So all the Democrats on the committee voted against the repeal and all the republicans voted for the repeal.
How is that a negligible difference? That's a massive maximum difference between the parties, in fact it was impossible to have a higher difference.
Do you have the voting records of this bill in committee? Of course there were 27 members, that's the sum of the Democrats and Republicans. That does not mean that they voted on party lines in committee.
This is the time to cut back on h1b permits.
Or, better yet, simply prevent any company who laid people off from being able to access any more H1-Bs for some number of years.
You can keep your current H1-Bs, but no more for you for 5 years if you do a layoff.
There are already limitations on hiring H1Bs after layoffs.
Not sure how that is better. Remove current H1Bs prior to any layoffs of US nationals.
Both should be implemented.
If you are laying workers off you clearly don't need additional H1B workers. You should be barred for at least a year if not more from putting in any applications for H1B after any major layoff.
It should also be scrutinized if you preferably fire local workers over your H1B workers. Anybody caught doing so should be barred from H1B for a decade.
I like my H1B coworkers, but things have gone too far. You can't do layoffs and simultaneously put in applications for thousands of H1B workers. It makes no logical sense and should be illegal. The system is completely broken right now.
Not to mention most of this H1B work is not actually due to lack of local talent. Building a web or mobile app is not rocket science and there are plenty of people capable of doing so. Any company putting in H1B for anything but research positions or positions requiring exceptional expertise is probably abusing the system.
>Both should be implemented.
Love your thinking here. Total agreement.
And yeah I have had great experiences with my H1B coworkers, but they are doing jobs that US professionals could easily do. At this point H1Bs are just (possibly unwitting?) scab labor.
H1-b s are small compared to the offshoring of jobs. Have you seen the office sizes of every big and medium technology company in India and other countries? They employ thousands of programmers there. There is a much greater number of jobs that you don’t even see that’s get done from overseas. This invisible layer is much bigger than the annual 65k h1b jobs.
I suspect this will become a key issue in Newsom's brand of center-left Democratic politics. It greatly affects both urban and college educated workforces - i.e the Democratic base. Canada took the lead here a few years ago under Trudeau's administration.
Good on the rust belt states for being able to get their unemployment down under 5.5%.
Might be a case of those who are permanently out of the workforce because they couldn't find work are not counted in unemployment statistics, along with flight and deaths of despair.
It’s helpful when the government is subsidizing your entire economy.
Farming, healthcare, autos, etc are almost completely subsidized by the government.
Careful. Coronado, Miramar, Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, Edwards, Mcclellan, Vandenburg, Travis, etc. How many bases do you think there are in Iowa?
I wonder if the participation rate is lower or people moved away.
Or maybe new jobs opened up.
Possible, but that's not really what my friends in those areas are seeing. The only real industry there is medical - taking care of all the old folks.
https://archive.is/Gsu0y
Unemployment in California was higher back in 2015. Feels like this is layoff related
It's more concentrated in the middle class now. There are this year lots of underemployment opportunities for the lower class, and with MediCal and other welfare you can make ends meet. I have worked in both economies.
I’ve started seeing emails from recruiters coming in again after a long drought. These unemployment figures will probably be lagging indicators.
After a long drought I've seen more recruiter emails recently but I do think the days of 500k-1M TC are dwindling. Big Tech seems to be moving a lot of positions to LCOL areas and I don't see that abating.
This very very very much depends what you do. ML critical-path roles are doing much better than everything else as far as I can tell.
In the midst of a gold rush, sell shovels and maps
In the less glib way, I'll draw attention to the fact that machine learning roles are only one moving part of the machinery required to manage, operate, train, evaluate, demo, and integrate AI adjacent opportunities. That's to say one need not be a pytorch or differential equation ninja to contribute meaningful to riding the hype train
Entirely agree. Most of the critical path roles are not foundation model training, even in places that do foundation model training.
I'm not sure if this is entirely related, but during COVID (in SF) I was always surprised to see my colleagues so adamant against RTO once the vaccine was widely disseminated. I always felt that if jobs were remote there would be no need to hire us specifically - they'd hire in the cheaper parts of the country remotely or worse yet, other countries. The usual retort was that folks in North Carolina, Canada, Eastern Europe, Bangalore or whatever weren't as good - but I always thought such rebuttals were arrogant at worst, and ignorant at best.
Sad to see that to some extent that's exactly what happened. My current tech take is that developers shouldn't allow AI and/or agents to do the entirety of their job, rather allow them to do more, and it should be framed as such specifically. e.g. don't use AI to write the entire feature, use it to make the feature better and drive more revenue, or more correct and result in less bugs, thus less wasted effort on ops/etc.
It's amusing to see some people excited for AI to do the entirety of the implementation and planning, as if there would be no impact on us. If AI is that good, you just need TPMs (to the extent it's even possible, anyway).
It's no surprise to see that jobs that cannot be done remotely are making a comeback.
Having seen what happens when TPMs run things and otherwise smart engineers just do what they’re told, I can assure you this will not lead to good outcomes no matter how good AI gets.
Yes, but at least this way you don't need to pair SWEs.
The topic deserves a lot better explanation.
It's not helpful to just talk about absolute numbers of jobs gained or lost in a sector without talking about percentages and historical variability.
It also appears the California number cited is based on a survey of ~4K people, some reporting they can't find work, while e.g., Federal unemployment is a function of people getting unemployment benefits. Do states do the same surveys with the same methodology, so the numbers are comparable? Likely not. So the term seems to be used in different senses, and "worst in the US" is unsupported.
Further, for tech in particular, it's not clear which jobs were converted to contracts, for AI services or outsourcing (in or out of US).
This kind of salad article is likely the future: enough for the general public worried about jobs, but not helpful to anyone who actually wants to understand and plan accordingly.
None of the above purported facts are true.
From the link: Employment and Unemployment in California (Based on a monthly federal survey of 4,400 California households which focuses on workers in the economy)
This is federal not state data.
Federal unemployment data is based on this said survey. This link explicitly debunks that myth: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
There's a reason most people you run into SF are either here on O1 or h1b visas these days...
Time to cull the waterloo crowd and maybe think twice about cheap outsourcing to latam and india.
As an American citizen, born and bred, I would literally, physically fight you on behalf of keeping Waterloo grads in America.
Many of the best coworkers I've had the pleasure of working with, not to mention the founders of the company I spent over a quarter of my career at (Pagerduty).
hear hear! I've worked with exceptional people from all sorts of backgrounds, but pound for pound, Waterloo CS grads are significantly better on average than grads from any other CS program. They start off way ahead, but also maintain that edge throughout their careers.
Disclosure: I'm a US citizen with multiple CS degree from MIT and my son is studying CS at Waterloo now.
Nice. I an researcher at MIT LL. In order to work at the lab you need to be a US citizen since a lot of it is federally funded. I tried to get my buddy, a Waterloo grad currently at Google, an interview but he is Canadian...
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A zero-sum mindset on a website dedicated to programming of all places? Where we literally create wealth out of nothing but coffee and the strength of our minds?
My love for my country means I want it to be the greatest in the world. Waterloo grads make America better. Period.
Some games (founding companies) are non-zero sum. Some (like employing Americans vs non-Americans) are zero sum.
You're just hand-waiving away reality, which is a very non-programmer thing to do.
A wonderful Book on immigration, math, history, facts, and zero sum
From an American author
(Illustrated, to reach those who talk about "stealing American jobs from Americans!!!" a lot).
From Amazon Canada, because I like fun too :-)
"Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration"
https://a.co/d/7GrrzzE
I've never met anyone that argued for open borders that wasn't capable of isolating themselves from the negative effects. Like say, a tenured professor like Bryan Caplan.
Open borders might be net-positive but would very predictably devastate the lives of poor people in America. Not that most people who advocate it know anything about being poor.
Hang on, are we upset that immigrants are taking the jobs of poor people in America?
I thought based on original post we were upset immigrants are taking high paying specialist jobs from the rich techies in San Francisco?
Or are they just just taking all the jobs while miraculously not spending any money and not creating any demand and not participating in economy at all?
I just want to understand this evil scourge appropriately.
P.s. (And oh, boy, will I compete in the "knowing about being poor" with anybody on HN :)
Poor Americans are the most in need of the opportunity tech jobs provide. That's how they can become non-poor Americans.
Poor Americans are also the most vulnerable to unskilled immigration making them even poorer than they already are.
It's not that complicated.
If they are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, that would imply that they are unskilled themselves. I don't see how they will be able to take advantage "opportunity tech jobs provide"--a highly skilled set of jobs.
I agree that poor Americans are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, but suggesting that highly skilled tech jobs are a solution is just not realistic.
Many poor people could make it into the middle class by learning to do skilled jobs if given the opportunity.
The number of opportunities is significantly reduced when companies have the easier and cheaper alternative of hiring non-Americans.
And those poor people that don't have the capability to become skilled workers can at least not be kicked while they're down.
> but suggesting that highly skilled tech jobs are a solution is just not realistic.
I went from homeless to six figures thanks to tech.
I think you are missing that tech is one of the few well paying industries that doesn't have socioeconomic gatekeeping with degrees.
Seeing this pablum on Hackernews is quite startling. It seems like its going to remain the "global warming is fake" of the economics world.
"Oh but I know of this study that.."...I know..I know.
Your argument is that all games are non-zero sum and supply and demand don't apply for some magical reason?
Seems like I'm making the sound economic argument and you're just casting aspersions.
I think the general overall notion is:
1. If, say, an immigrant earns 70k, they will also spend 70k. It's an equilibrium - they "create" as much jobness as they "take".
2. The easiest intuitive explanation I have is - imagine a million immigrants move in. They're basically a self sufficient city - with police and doctors and teachers and mechanics and salespeople and whatever. Doesn't bother me.
In fact, America is by definition (unless one is native American) the land of immigrants. It is clearly factually historically obvious that immigration was not zero sum and it continually expanded overall prosperity and might of the American empire. It's only when we zoom into the very here and now that some people, for some reason, freak out and feel "omg immigrants!!".
1. Immigrants send to their home countries very significant amounts of their income, so it's always going to be net-negative in that sense.
2. Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
Of course America is a land of immigrants. And of course immigration can be positive-sum.
That doesn't prove that it's always positive-sum.
It's easy to see many situations that are not positive sum. Huge amounts of unskilled immigration is, at least in the short-term, going to be extremely zero-sum because they will consume far more public resources than they pay for, depriving the existing users. This has played out many times.
In other words:
Too much skilled immigration takes good middle class jobs away from citizens that need them.
Too much unskilled immigration takes public resources and jobs away from citizens that need them.
Given those facts, the argument should be about how much is too much of any particular kind of immigration for any particular time and place.
>> Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
I think you have the mindset where there are X jobs, static, unchanging, God given or government ordained or whatever, and if an immigrant takes a job that job is gone. Array, counter, n=n-1, done.
That's... Not my mindset, and I don't think that's how it works.
Those million people don't take a million jobs from some enumerated, inflexible list, and then shutdown. They live. They consume! They earn and then they turn around and they spend, they need homes and food and clothes and education, all of which is jobs.
I think you imagined a swarm of people who displaced others, but imagine literally a million people coming and creating a new city. So of the million, some are techies and some are janitors and some are farmers and some are doctors and they have a nice little self sufficient city and don't bug or impact anybody outside of that city.
If/when/once you visualize the concept of that self sufficiency, now we can discuss the more complex case of them joining an existing city - because yes of course it's more complex than people coming in and living independently, but it's also more complex than them stealing jobs off some imaginary closed list.
Let's not imagine scenarios that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
Answer this question: what evidence would you accept to show that major American tech companies are using skilled immigration to drive down their labor costs as the expense of American citizens?
I cannot keep up with the moving targets. My honest, sincere impression based on my best read of your posts is that you are making a sweeping claim against immigration along all axis and skill levels. I disagreed.
Now your claim is that massive American tech companies are profit-focused, narrow-vision entities with no social qualms or human values, and I could not agree more :-). But that’s orthogonal to the wider immigration discussion.
1. I didn't move any targets and your impression is clearly not at all sincere.
2. That is not my claim at all, since you're dropping half of the claim.
I think we're done here.
Lol. Called it. Always with the moving goal posts.
Oh but remittances are high! Think of the short term effects.
I will mention my Indian coworkers parents use the remittances to buy Netflix subscriptions, Coca-Cola and American Corn but it won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough.
Constant-pie thinking is an all consuming identity not a rational viewpoint that can be reasoned with.
Funny how you applaud yourself for being correct but make no actual arguments.
What are you claiming? That immigrants do not actually remit significant percentage of their income? That all or most remitted money comes back to America? That short-term effects do not matter even if they're highly destructive?
You're claiming that I believe in a fixed pie which could not possibly be further from the truth. But I do believe that some pies are fixed, some of the time, in some places. Are you claiming the opposite? That pies are never fixed?
You're the one who isn't arguing in a rational way.
“Demand is fixed, they're coming or your jobs” is your “Temperatures always rise and fall, there is no global warming”.
I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.
Your arguments are so convincing you don't even need to make them and there's no chance you're the one that's refusing to acknowledge reality. Okay...
> Some games (founding companies) are non-zero sum. Some (like employing Americans vs non-Americans) are zero sum.
Not even wrong
It’s probably negative sum because you end up hiring more offshore workers but still end up spending less
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> Americans make america great. We got the moon without indians.
Yeah but we got to the moon with imported Nazi German rocket scientists. Still "immigrants" of a sort.
yup,Operation Paperclip. This program brought over 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of whom were former members of the Nazi Party and some with SS affiliations, to the U.S. for government employment between 1945 and 1959.
The flip side should also be said, Canada and many other countries have talent drained by the US since they can't compete on pay.
It's hard to say, but who knows what could have been if the top Canadians had have to start or join Canadian companies and didn't have the option to take a higher pay in the US.
> Canada and many other countries have talent drained by the US since they can't compete on pay.
What's the relevance here of this? Canada should make better opportunities for their citizens.
And the reverse of that is that folks in the US should agree to work for less; so that they get the jobs. Neither one is as easy as it sounds.
That is not the reverse. Canada should make better opportunities for it's citizens and so should the US.
That's "homeless people should just buy homes" level of thinking.
A wealthy country's government, by most standards, is comparable to a homeless person?
I like the way you think. As a Canadian, I’m disgusted that we educate our youth and then send them to the US to take jobs from Americans and pay taxes to the Americans. We should be putting them to work in Canada instead so we can build companies and industries in Canada instead of America.
/s, but not really.
> We should be putting them to work in Canada instead so we can build companies and industries in Canada instead of America
OK...I'll bite. Every Canadian government, of either party, has agreed with you for the last sixty years. Your country has excellent universities, the infrastructure is decent, the politics are non-violent...and yet people bail. I could say the same about the UK as well, but it's harder for their brains to drain to the US.
So: why is Canada failing to hold on to their homegrown talent? Is it a "push out" of Canada (driving talent away) or a "pull in" to the US (America having something irresistible)?
The American dream in silicon valley was built in part by these folks. They stay here and become Americans both culturally and legally and it's fantastic. Some of them even become Republicans.
As others have pointed out it's not a zero sum game since human capital begets growth.
The sudden explosion in zero-sum thinking in the right wing will be studied for generations
It's a defining characteristic of reactionary thought and it's already studied.
Funny how H1Bs are responsible for the destruction of the American labor force but also happen to be represented most in the jobs whose salary and size have grown the most in the U.S. over the past 2+ decades.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that H1Bs are most represented in the industry that has generated nearly all the growth that has been generated in America over the past 2-3 decades.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that slave labor is most represented in the industry that generated nearly all of America’s economic growth during the 18th and 19th century.
Is the argument you're making, which is ridiculous.
The success of an industry says nothing about how exploitative or unethical its practices are.
Not sudden.
The way many people like yourself seem to have been completely fooled by major corporations wanting cheaper labor to exploit (through both legal, semi-legal, and illegal immigration) will be studied for generations.
Their favorite trick (which you've adopted here) is to accuse people of being "racist" and "right wing" for objecting.
For the record, you would have to search long and hard to find someone more opposed to Trump and his minions than myself. Bernie Sanders has the same basic viewpoint I've expressed.
I have absolutely no hatred for anyone based on their origin or race.
I am completely in favor of allowing as many people into this country as we can sustainably absorb, and even a little more. At the same time, I strongly object to prioritizing the desire of major corporations to exploit cheaper labor at the expense of American citizens.
I don’t really know what you’re responding to
Your suggestion that these are "right wing" ideas when Bernie Sanders says the same thing and for the same reasons. You might accuse him of being "zero sum" but you can't accuse him of being right wing.
“Canadians”, touché.
Not only is this mindset disgusting, it is completely wrong. Labor is not zero sum, jobs create more jobs. Immigrants are what has made this country great, allowing immigration was critical to the US becoming the industrial/financial/tech capital of the world. Shutting down immigration will weaken our economy, it will cost americans jobs.
there is no more american dream, and anyone who “creates” jobs in this economy and era of rampant hypercapitalism isn’t really enabling or transferring wealth.
if there were ample americans to do these jobs, they should be able to get them.
nationalism is a silly idea, anyway. and we should have free trade and movement with our biggest two allies. american exceptionalism is a joke
You're arguing that Americans have no more right to success in America than non-Americans. I don't think many Americans will agree with you.
And neither will most people from any other country agree about their own country's success.
> Americans have no more right to success in America than non-Americans. Americans literally voted to defund the education system, voted for administration(s) that will amplify spending money to hire foreigners to keep America center of top talent/skill across domains and most importantly voted for extreme capitalism.
Indians or Canadians are not forcing US to hire them bud, https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
Major corporations are hiring them because they're cheaper not because there aren't well educated Americans available.
There are more than 60 million college educated Americans. That's 50% more than the entire population of Canada.
It's a very big and well educated country, bud.
There have never been more unemployed new college grads studying computer science and computer engineering. There are ample americans ready to take these jobs.
Boomers promulgated lies about "shortages" for years to lobby for relaxed visa schemes. Ironic you mention nationalism being silly, since Indians are some of the most openly caustic nationalists I encounter on a daily basis.
What about the "masters" diploma mills?
Of course visa mill down votes..
> Time to cull the waterloo crowd
Are implying that reducing the number of graduates from a single program (CS) at one specific university (Waterloo) from a country 10x smaller from the US (Canada) will help lower tech employment in California?
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Why should US graduates compete with non-US workers in the US? Call me scared or incompetent or uncompetitive but I just don't want to compete in that way. All those people can stay in their countries and out-compete US grads there.
Because technology is a global industry and if you can’t compete with these workers you surely won’t be able to compete with these workers when the company that was willing to pay them $150k to work in San Francisco can pay them $50k to work out of Romania.
Instead of that individual now paying 80-90% of their income to US taxes and US businesses and saving the rest in U.S. banks providing even cheaper capital for US businesses, they will be doing the same in Romania.
And worse, if that person does create a new startup, the majority of employees hired will be in Romania, and only a tiny fraction would be Americans who moved there to work for that company, and would be competing with American companies with a much lower cost basis.
But hey, Romania will be pleased for sure.
I'll take the other side of this bet.
I'm sure there are other smart USians but shit there's a fuckload more globally and I get to work with them and it's great. And then if they stay long enough they become citizens.
My rule of thumb is if I'm the smartest person in the room then we've got serious problems.
If they're so smart maybe they should help their own country build companies...
Well that's how you get competent foreign competitors, congratulations.
I really appreciate this generation of my fellow countrymen who just completely ignore all the benefits of brain draining literally every country on the planet of their ambitious and intelligent youth.
Oh well, better tell em all to go back. Might as well tell our allies to rearm because we’re worried about being ripped off. I for one will not feel ripped off when Germany has a functioning military again. It has always gone well for the planet when Europe is armed and angry
Just because you are losing does not mean you can change the rules of the game midway. Who kicked off globalization in the first place?
I have no idea what your point is with your first sentence. For your second sentence, what size of organization are you looking for? There was no single person or entity who decided to kick that off unilaterally
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if it means I can hire Waterloo graduates again here in Canada that sounds fantastic
I couldn't agree more! Canada has massive potential, albeit also large issues with their immigration system being gamed.
In my opinion, outsourcing is a larger evil. The money used to pay the salaries of outsourced engineers should be taxed at-least at 20% (along with remittances to India) akin to what we currently penalize foreign countries for maliciously suppressing the cost of physical goods. This is called Countervailing Duty or Anti Dumping Duty penalties.
I've reached my limit with the entitlement of these people in the united states. Especially systematically excluding americans or non-indians once they reach a hiring level / role.
Indian software wages are about 1/3 US. The U.S. would need to tax them much more to dissuade outsourcing.
How will you tax people in India sitting here in US?
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Arguably, the purpose of a company is to generate profit. If US companies need skilled workers that they can't find locally, they will open or expand their international offices. At least the O1/H1B visa holders pay taxes in the US and contribute to the local economy.
The United States is not an economic zone.
Non-resident visa holders are not citizens and act accordingly against the interests of citizens and their families.
Arguably the purpose of a country is the furtherance of its citizenry. The US system should be set up to disincentivize US companies from bringing scab labor into the US.
In practical terms this would look like eliminating H1B/O1 programs.
It's not most people you meet, its most people you remember you meet.
https://dictionary.apa.org/distinctiveness-effect
Corporations are just absolutely devastated at the fact that they cannot hire an H1B in California for $150k but will now have to hire the exact same person in India for $60k in one of the most remote friendly industries in the world.
If your sarcastic comment were true they'd be offshoring wholesale even with the existence of the H1B program.
Take a guess where majority of google cloud hiring is these days
You honestly don’t think they already do that as much as possible?
California’s economy feels like it’s running on tech companies at this point. Any downturn in their hiring has really big effects on the California state budget.
That's the downside of depending on regressive income taxes instead of taxing assets, capital gains, dividends, etc sufficiently.
California has the most progressive taxation scheme of any state. Dividends and capital gains are taxed as income. I’m curious what you would consider “sufficient” taxation - the top marginal combined rate for a Californian is over 50%.
I think California had the highest capital gains tax in the US.
What it needs is more property tax aga, or better yet, land value tax.
So the clickbait headline is "as tech falters" but tech actually had the least losses of any sector, except government. More correct in all possible ways would have been "as construction falters", "as manufacturing falters", or "as banking falters".
it's a little tricky with the labels, they did mention that professional and business did the worst of all sectors and while information sector lost jobs as well, that sounds like the closest match for tech so I have reservations about the claim as well
Generally the BLS categories are hard to parse. Some major companies are software categories, others are information. But in general the "information" sector is pretty heavy on newspapers, books, and film as well. And search engines etc have their own categories.
Would you be able to guess without looking what top-level category contains Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, or Google?
It is only two weeks ago the commissioner of labor statistics got fired and going forward one needs to be very sceptical about the integrity of numbers or statistics coming from the official US government resources. How can anyone at this point trust any US statistics?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-commissioner-of-lab...
Same newspaper last week: tech guys so over-abundant they are paying $2000 each to sleep in bunk beds in Mission flophouses.
you can still have a local AI boom in SF (which has a housing shortage) while tech employment falls state-wide
Worst reported.
Serious question: who is producing reliable numbers now? The Trump administration is actively suppressing federal reporting and openly threatening to cease collecting and reporting data,
and this is absolutely signaling to sycophants and supporters that they should falsify or withhold unflattering data.
This is a truly terrible timeline.
The USSR went this route and it worked out great. It’ll be interesting to watch the U.S. do the same.
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> WHICH IS A HUGE REASON WHY TRUMP IS ASKING FOR RATES TO COME DOWN!!!!! The guy freaking knows business, whether your little minds can accept it or not, the people in charge right now actually are trying to fix this crap.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.*
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The implication was that, going forwards, the numbers would be more accurately calculated in order to reflect REALITY of US employment, which is far bleaker than any of us really wishes to accept, myself included!
Ok, would that imply that if the jobs numbers are not worse in the next couple of reports and instead, are suspiciously higher then the administration is in fact cooking the books?
H1B visas are not going to help the situation. The reality is our corporate structure lobbies for legislation that lowers wages through various means and is quite effective at doing it.
These might be the only reliable numbers in the country…
Hmm anecdotally I’m seeing a lot of hiring in all places ranging from faang to startups. So tech hiring is not evenly distributed.
There is definitely hiring going on, but having seen this now from the hiring manager side, companies are flooded with candidates because of all the tech layoffs.
So yes, companies are hiring, but it’s hard to get hired right now because of the volume of candidates.
Not impossible, but definitely harder.
In my anecdotal experience hiring has been picking up but it seems that everyone expects the 2021 ZIRP economy where new grads were getting $200-300k offers with easy interviews. The experienced hire market is now back to where we were in 2015-2016 and new hire market slightly lagging behind. Unfortunately a lot of people will have to be comfortable working for non tech companies in tech roles like 10 years ago. It sucks because the living standards are more expensive than 10 years ago.
I'm not seeing many jobs in my area for non-tech companies. The non-tech company is working for is outsourcing to India. I might be getting terminated soon and expect I will end up working retail. Nobody wants early career generalists.
It's starting to hit product management and sales roles.
I just had to accept a keep the lights on offer. Still a software role, but I'm making what I was in 2018 without adjusting for inflation.
2020 I was making about 80k more, even though I got that job through a combination of networking and luck.
My budget is less ball out and more it's nice I covered my rent
Most developers have always worked for non tech companies…
I agree but that’s not the expectation a lot of people I meet have, especially new grads
This is the right take, plus the glut of applicants.
It could be FAANG retreating from HCOLs to LCOLs with the hope that they can make up the expertise gap with AI.
This is a big part. Lots of rotating L6 and L7 with L4 and 5
Unless you can provide some evidence for that, it seems like pretty plain BS. The issues with outsourcing/offshoring were never the kind that can be solved with AI.
It’s pretty obvious the future is low wage devs using AI. It’s only a matter of time before US devs are squeezed out of the market.
AI is good at low wage junior work, not senior work. It's the other way around
I believe you have it backwards, the future is having high wage devs use AI. Imagine a world where a single high wage devs with lots of experience can oversee say 10 AI agents. The boilerplate and grunt work can be taken care of by the agents and the human can refine the results as they know better than the AI and where the AI went wrong.
If you stick a low experience human in front of an AI the human does not know if the AI is spewing nonsense and therefore sometimes you will get nonsense from the process.
Are those job posts or actual hires?
Yes, I was going to ask the same question. Article on the topic:
https://www.apollotechnical.com/ghost-jobs-in-tech-why-compa...
Is it possible that the companies with cash to burn are trying to take advantage of the situation and swoop up talent on the cheap?
I got my first (and only; I changed careers) tech job in 2014. I only learned years later that 2014 was considered a "down" year for the industry. The "job market" exists at the margins. If you're good, you get hired.
>> If you're good, you get hired
In the long term. But in the long term we're all dead.
I only have one social media account, LinkedIn, and I have that account because I wanted to help people that got laid off from the company I worked for who were good, but were definitely not getting hired in 2008. There were developers who were top notch, but they weren't getting hired, they were sitting there not working getting poorer, frustrated and divorced.
I'm on my last job so I have no idea what the job market is like now, don't know don't care, but no. There are times when even the best developers can't even get a phone interview.
This is why you should live below your means and save money when times are good. It's very possible, especially in the tech industry to get to a position where you can comfortably ride out a few years of a crappy job market
Yeah that was my M.O., had to step down a few months ago to take care of a mobility issue and I'm glad I planned for it.
I got my start around then as a junior working fully remote with 6 months experience.. something everyone assures me is impossible
Perseverance is the most important thing I think
That's hiring for people with AI skills. If you're not in AI, you're fked right now.
Not true. The people who are screwed right now are juniors. There's still a lot of hiring happening for traditional development.
Not every business is in tech.
Every business uses tech.
R&D tax credit problem fixed, now development starts to get back on track at a lot of companies.
Or peripheral to it, e.g. data engineering for pre-training data or a joint DE/ML role, etc. Sometimes the scale (petabyte) or specific stack experience is a barrier.
Got to love our kakistocracy.
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Anyone talking about CA saying "oh, how can they be redistricting" should STFU and direct their ire at Texas and Trump. They started this, demanding this completely irregular mid-decade redistricting, so I for one am thrilled the Dems are finally growing a pair and fighting back.