India needs more entrepreneurs.
In broad terms it's good for the Indian tech ecosystem (and the economy in general).
I'm sure a bunch of companies took advantage of the H1-B program, but without a doubt it took most of the best talent too.
LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup
you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market
Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
For a bit of time I worked offshore for a company in the US. That was pure cost cutting, I was making probably around 5x-10x less than someone with similar skills in the US.
After a while I landed a job that required me to migrate to a different country. I actually make more here than the average salary for a local engineer.
I don't know many machinists that are hired from halfway across the globe, relocation costs included, to make more than the average machinist in the destination country.
Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital
It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction
People wonder why software developers are anti-union it’s because they are fundamentally capitalist at heart
But they eat up the propaganda about how they totally could just happen to get that capital and run a one man software business and make a billion dollars.
Which is why they spent all that time and energy insisting they didn't have to unionize, because they were super important and could totally negotiate better than anyone else, especially a giant group of programmers, and now are panicking because dumb middle managers want to replace them with LLMs entirely.
Very predictable.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to call it offshoring.
If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.
At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
In the old days that approach would have obviously worked poorly (it was tried, and it went poorly).
IMO, as the company grew various issues inevitably reduced Eng effectiveness to the point where now outsourcing is no worse.
Now even if you could hire the best from around the world and get them all to MTV, it would not really matter.
Because we spent all this money on Mac Minis to do the work for us.
Allowing US companies to find talent abroad means those companies can deliver better products and makes competition more viable (ie lowers prices for consumers). If we only care about “jobs” and the size of paychecks, then protectionism is the way to go. But if we actually want to provide broad based prosperity (especially for our own citizenry), then you should not protect a small subset of high paid workers.
However, in my opinion, if these companies want to continue to enjoy preferable tax treatment and the deregulated environment the US provides them, then they should be expected to hire people in the US to drive the US economy.
If they're not going to do that, then we (meaning the Government both state and federal) should stop incentivizing them. Why would we give government contracts to a company that's offshoring jobs? Why would we give them tax breaks? Why would we leave their markets largely unregulated?
The US Government should incentivize and support companies that are providing value residents of the US. As these companies move to offshoring (and other similar policies), they become economically extractive and the government should no longer support and enable such behavior.
Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.
If they have less flexibility to hire in the US, they will hire elsewhere if they can. They still have an incentive to hire in the US as it's easier to collaborate when everybody is close by, but apparently it's not enough to favor (less skilled and/or more expensive) US citizens.
What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."
Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
Not to mention that in this case, it is the opposite intended effect of new policies.
I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent.
This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here.
It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
The US is one country, "Europe" is what, 44 countries? You posit that 44 countries "did the same thing a century ago." How surprising can it possibly be that a 45th country might join that prestigious list... maybe?
I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
- Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason)
- Outsource, offshore, automate, etc
- Margins and revenue go up
- Two to Three Years go by
- Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor
- Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored
- Executives parachute out successfully
- New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive
- Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country
- Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit
- Leader parachutes out successfully
- New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time
The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections).
None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way.
Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.
> In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay out significant accumulated dividends, limiting Henry Ford's ability to prioritize employee wages and consumer prices over shareholder returns.
The “shareholder value” mandate is one of the greatest perversions of the “free market” out there, miles above any discourse about minimum wages or worker protection laws. Undo that decision along with the Reagan-era ruling permitting share buybacks, and you’d substantially weaken the Boardroom and C-Suite while turning off the two single biggest incentives to the current system of exploitation.
In the post-2000 bubble crash companies rushed to outsource their IT for cheap. From about 2001 to 2004, similar to the AI bubble today, companies [laid off] their current staff and [pushed offshore]. After 2004 on the cracks appeared when the code and services resulted in [poor quality], but companies had to pay again to get fixes from their offshore teams, just like AI agents now. This led to a [reversal] by mid-2000s, but by then the CS and IT graduate pipeline had [collapsed].
> Just four or five years ago, around 220 students were shopping CS 15: "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science" at the beginning of the year, and this fall, only about 100 students shopped the course. "It's been going down every year for the past four years and this year, I think there are close to 60 students in the course, and I haven't had that few since the '60s," said Professor of Computer Sciences and Vice President for Research Andries van Dam, who teaches CS 15. [brown]
I observed the 2000 Dot-Bomb, the mid-2000s offshoring, and the 2008 financial crisis all left a major crater in the CS profession, leading to the furious competition for talent in the 2010s.
[laid off]: https://www.edn.com/half-a-million-high-tech-jobs-lost-in-20...
[pushed offshore]:
- https://www.upi.com/Archives/2002/12/20/FeatureIndia-changes...
- https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2230583/outsourcing-megade...
[poor quality]: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2002/02/44-2-the-winners-curse-in-i...
[reversal]: https://www.cio.com/article/252676/outsourcing-outsourcing-a...
[collapsed]:
- https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking-salaries/outsour...
- https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1226/p02s01-usec.html
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/computer-science-enrollment-do...
- https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/gates-computer-sc...
[brown]: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2004/10/cs-classes-...
alephnerd•1h ago
And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...
[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
weirdmantis69•1h ago
barbazoo•1h ago
kadabra9•1h ago
alephnerd•1h ago
CompSci fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason.
kadabra9•1h ago
I wish guys like you could just be honest and admit its really just about trying to save on labor costs rather than trying to frame this issue like there's some massive lack of skilled domestic engineering talent here.
alephnerd•1h ago
You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background.
Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
anonym29•1h ago
andrew_lettuce•1h ago
kadabra9•1h ago
You would just rather find offshore candidates and pay them less, rather than paying domestic salaries.
Which, ok, fair enough, but at least own it instead of fabricating some "pipeline shortage" to justify trying to save a buck on labor costs.
Teever•1h ago
Every time I read stuff like this on HN I think to myself "Man the downfall of SV can't come soon enough."
mixmastamyk•1h ago
shimman•1h ago
So yeah it seems like these companies that rely on massive corporate welfare + the backing of the US government don't want to pony up and pay their fair share.
Why should the government provide utilities to you or public education or firefighters or a legal system for you? What are you doing to make your end of the societal bargain copasetic?
You come across as greedy, people know you're insanely greedy. Why do you continue to be greedy and not help the community? The community is literally on the cusp of inflicting a massive amount of damage and let's not act like this administration won't start going after H1B workers once it becomes marketed as taking well paying jobs away from Americans who are struggling to pay their bills. You can even play it to garner more Congressional support by telling big tech to start relocating jobs into red/competitive districts or they will start taking revoking their H1B workers visas.
It's a powder keg situation and you want to shovel more gun powder around the keg rather than deescalate.
surgical_fire•38m ago
Because typically that's not what you are hiring, even if effectively that's what you will have the engineer doing often.
I was hired for my problem solving skills. For being able to design an application end-to-end. For being able to extend a messy existing system in ways that are sensible. For being able to analyze issues and come up with ways to address them. For coming up with answers for legacy issues. Those among many other things.
Anyone out of a boot camp can write a Java endpoint using Spring. If you think that's what the company is hiring, you are sorely mistaken.
I say this as someone that was an interviewer in past jobs, including FAANG.
_DeadFred_•18m ago
Software companies invented whiteboard hiring questions in order to determine which random average person could be trained to be a good developer. It's wild to see how dogmatic you all have become today.
parineum•1h ago
There's no housing shortage, just a shortage of house at the right place and price. Different places have the right price, the right places don't have the right prices.
There's no job shortage, just a shortage of jobs that pay what I want and am qualified for.
Shortages happen in controlled economies, capitalism just adjusts prices.
Scarblac•49m ago
If wages are too high, then some work just doesn't get done, some business plans are now unviable.
But everybody needs a place to live.
ThrowawayR2•1h ago
kadabra9•55m ago
jmclnx•1h ago
There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s.
Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock price growing. Then once the investors can sell the stock, they bail leaving the company to figure out how to survive by itself.
simianwords•1h ago
Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.
kadabra9•52m ago
simianwords•19m ago
What alternative do you propose?
jonfw•54m ago
Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring.
It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline is of the quality to make it better!
As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.
surgical_fire•36m ago
Training is expensive and can fail.
That's why experience has value.
energy123•1h ago