Wherever their major offices are look for newspapers in the small towns nearby advertising for "Software developers for Oracle" all written in the tiniest print, right next to classified that sell used bikes, car parts and other stuff.
- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
Just to cut through the headline here. The largest chunk of Oracle layoffs were in India [1]. In comparison, they've barely fired any American workers.
Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.
From your first link, it says 10% of 28k employees in India were cut. I personally know several people who were laid off from Oracle this week (OCI). One person who's still there described it as a "bloodbath across our division" and says he counted 15k. I don't know what exactly he was counting but as we're in North America I am assuming they're all here. Whereas India layoffs were fewer than 3k. So that directly disputes your statement that "they've barely fired any American workers".
Can confirm. Friend laid off on team of 15, that team is now down to 7. They built datacenters, too. US based. That's, sorta concerning since I thought their entire future bag was making datacenters......
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
FWIW, I'm not saying we are at full employment for all possible specializations and geography's, clearly some are out and others are in and we have some of the most immobile labor we've seen in a while [1]. The problem, as with many things, is housing. People simply can't (and aren't) moving to where the jobs are.
Same issue in my country with employment rates. Yes, some of those have been looking for work for so long that they slide from looking to "not looking" automatically. However at the same time, some of those people actually don't want to work.
And if they don't want to work, why would that impinge upon full employment, because what is the plan? Force people to work who are retired, or don't want to? Work or go to jail? "Full employment" is always presumed to be "people wanting to work can find it".
The U6 is also historically low though. America is as fully employed as just about anytime in the past 50 years. Using a different metric may have different raw numbers, but the conclusion is the same.
>America is as fully employed as just about anytime in the past 50 years.
And what percentage of those workers are Walmart or Amazon warehouse employees who don't have healthcare coverage and don't make enough money to actually cover their monthly bills without being on welfare/public assistance?
Because my linkedin extended network says there's an awful lot of highly skilled people unable to find jobs in their respective fields.
I suppose we simply disagree, and that is fine. I think the H-1B should be eliminated in favor of the O-1, the domestic labor exists, corporations would simply prefer "optimize their labor costs" and employ workers with reduced mobility via the H-1B. The data is clear from the salaries paid, which is public data.
As I've commented previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257889 "I am calling for a temporary moratorium for issuing new worker visas based on the current economic macro and existing immigrant worker base in the US companies can pick from, yes. I support the current $100k H-1B fee, in perpetuity. The domestic workforce exists, it is a choice to not pick from the domestic labor pool. Choices have consequences."
The US has an obligation to its citizens, not corporations, not immigrant labor (already on US soil, or desiring to be on US soil). Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context. Again, we may disagree on this, but I think I can find a majority of Americans who do agree with this sentiment (considering the current macro and affordability crisis in the US).
> Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context.
"We fail to tax our corporations adequately, so the proceeds of rampant deregulation and profiteering don't benefit the general populace".
I don't necessarily disagree with your stance but this seems like a weak justification (it's pragmatic, to be fair)
Just for reference, if you’re in tech and a senior even in a 2nd tier city, you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I have personally been in the room when illegal labor decisions were made around H-1B hiring and immigration law, which I reported to USCIS. But that doesn't scale unless you can get into more places where these decisions are made. So, when all you have is a hammer, you have to hit whatever is within reach of the target outcome.
> you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I am closer to a blue collar worker than a CEO or other very wealthy/empowered person driving these anti labor decisions, so your argument is not compelling, I know who these people are behind closed doors. It's always about some combination of wealth, profit, status, power, and/or control.
I do not need their approval to want better for them, or to advocate for or take action to achieve the same. How they see me is irrelevant. Humans are tricky.
Seeing who rural America routinely votes for and that they rather vote for someone who hates the same people they hate at their own expense (including people who look like me) - I stop caring, I’m over it.
You can turn the numbers anyway you want but the results of the 2024 election speaks for themselves. Like I said this is the country that the citizens want.
Before the retort starts that “if that’s what I think then why don’t I leave?”, corporate America has been decent to me. But I’m in my 50s and working on my exit plan and have been in the country I plan to retire to now for six weeks.
> corporate America has been decent to me. But I’m in my 50s and working on my exit plan and have been in the country I plan to retire to now for six weeks.
Crazy take to think the morally correct move is to capitalize on the virtuous parts of America, then leave when it's at its most vulnerable.
Here's to hoping the rest of your generation is willing to fight to bring back the country that allowed you to prosper.
I voted for an advocated for “progressive”/safety net policies all of my adult life. But why should I fight for people who would care less if they saw me hanging from a tree? I don’t owe a country that sees me as less of person as anything.
No I’m not saying everyone is racist.
My fight is closer to being done than starting. In the country I’m in right now (and have been for four weeks), the police don’t look at me suspiciously, the people are nice and tolerant of my horrible Spanish, the ex pat groups I’ve become a part of are friendly and welcoming (and not patronizing like a lot of west coast liberals) even though I’m the only minority in the group.
Did I mention the country I’m in now that they have universal healthcare, a sensible vaccination policy, they actually enforce a decent wage on service staff so they don’t have to live on tips, etc?
For me? I will continue “adding on to what Becky said”, “looking at things from the 1000 foot view and finding synergies” and doing the other corporate speak with decision makers as long as they pay me and continue to allow me working remotely.
The US won’t get better. A large part of the country has been racist, homophobic , etc since its founding. My still living parents grew up in the segregated south and the country voted for a president who claimed Black immigrants were eating pets in 2024.
It's actually exploitative, on both ends but one worse than the other.
H1Bs wind up feeling forced to work far more hours than they should, but then it adds pressure to any in-house employees to work more than they should too.
It's extra evident in the people that go from H1B to full citizenship, they often never learn to just take a break, sometimes to their own detriment.
Overworking H1Bs isn't what people are concerned about (yes it's an issue and part of the problem because it's an extra incentive). Importing people to supplant the local talent who are more than capable of doing the work, widening the labor pool to weaken labor's power, claiming it's "meritocracy" and that everyone who doesn't agree is somehow racist or "illiberal" are the core issues.
Also to cut through the headlines once again. What the article actually says:
> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.
There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.
Most petitions are filed over the summer, so the numbers so far in this financial year are not super relevant to anything. You will see a spike pretty soon after petitions for lottery winners this year are filed.
Yes, Its sad to see the reactionary hate triggered by a misleading article.
The number from 2025 is not really relevant when the layoffs were in March 2026. The article author clearly has a narrative they want to push.
And of the 436 petitions in 2026, only 235 are new hires (remaining are continuing approvals). Hardly a scandal there. Especially if they're likely hiring AI engineers and laying off call center employees - its not like their laying off an american citizen to hire a cheap H1B employee as this article is angling to have the reader believe.
The cuts include workers in senior director and vice president roles, as well as managers, product developers, product managers, program managers, software developers, site reliability developers, technical analysts, user experience developers and others.
They are in no-way laying off call center employees, they are laying off tens of thousands of the most highly paid US workers.
And yes the numbers of H1Bs granted in 2025 is relevant. You don't layoff 20% of your 100,000+ people workforce all of a sudden 'cos March went badly.
> And yes the numbers of H1Bs granted in 2025 is relevant. You don't layoff 20% of your 100,000+ people workforce all of a sudden 'cos March went badly.
You don’t know that the layoffs are happening tomorrow. That’s how layoffs work. Except for a few in the loop everyone else is largely in the dark. Hiring doesn’t stop, whether it’s us citizens or it’s H1Bs. 2025 hiring, whether H1B or not, is immaterial here.
I din't know which planet you are on, but on this one replacing is enforced extremely infrequently, and anybody who had to deal with the process knows it. Your example, where they catch the whopping 12 (!) cases - out of almost 100k h1bs per year - is only a testament of how small the enforcement is.
Either I'm stupid or [2] doesn't actually say anything at all. It starts with "in 2025..." And later talks about how estimates are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond while referencing data that ended in 1988. What am I missing?
"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."
> This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s,
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
Why would Oracle replace Americans with H-1Bs if they had to pay the same salaries??
Actually H-1Bs are more expensive than Americans due to visa costs and attorney costs, so Oracle can SAVE money by hiring Americans, yet they still decide to continue hiring H1Bs along with Americans.
Because H1b is an arrangement that more or less amounts to indentured servitude where vulnerable people have their visa status glued to their at-will employment agreement, resulting in a dynamic where employers can and frequently do expect unpaid overtime, fewer sick days, and otherwise disproportionately greater value from h1b employees, and those who fail to meet these unfair expectations are let go and effectively evicted from the country as it is extraordinarily rare to to secure another h1b job within 60 days.
The number on two paystubs can be the exact same while one person is being brutally overworked and the other given a leisurely, comfortable WLB, which effectively amounts to underpaying the foreign labor, per unit of output, devaluing each unit of labor of domestic output.
H1b is tied to employment, not to the employer. You can change employers on the same H1.
It’s not great. But this is similar to how health insurance is tied to employment, not to the employer. Both citizens and H1 employees experience the same abuse here
It’s not at all time highs. Your chart combines the data for both genders, which causes the decline in employment to be masked by the separate trend of women working outside the home. Male prime age employment is down 10 percentage points from 1955: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S
A higher percentage of prime age adults are working outside the house than almost any time in recent US history. I don’t understand why an analysis of the state of US employment should exclude women, can you please expand on your reasoning?
> why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?
Software is undergoing a secular downsizing. It increasingly looks like we have too many SWEs, and that we need to support them retraining. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a labor shortage in other industries.
The presupposition behind that question is that immigration is a necessary evil to be limited as much as possible. I am not American, but that strikes me as an ironic position for Americans to take.
> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.
And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.
> America is at near full employment [2].
Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.
> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.
Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.
And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...
And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.
But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.
Do you have the underlying data? I’m curious if per capita is being averaged across whole population or workers. If the former, that seems to penalize younger-aged countries.
> Consumer price index is probably the most common one and it doesn’t include housing
Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)
Honestly, even if that takes into account housing and everything, doesn't that seem... pathetic? All of the automation and technological advancement and productivity gains over the past 45 years, and average workers in the US see a measly 15% higher real wage over that timespan. Compared to the obscene (real) wealth increase by those at the top during the same span, this seems pathetic to me.
You are looking for a good job, not any job. Capital allocator decided that you do not deserve a good one anymore. Time to shake the fist at the sky and blame the times.
Without knowing anything about that particular case, I would assume that the person was initially hired as an F-1 student and later changed to OPT status. University IT tends to hire students to entry-level positions all around the world. And now Stanford wants to keep the proven employee instead of going through the uncertainty of hiring a new person.
So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.
it could be not blatant violation, but they more like don't track this on their side because don't think it is a big deal, so some individual can act like that.
Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.
I worked at a company once that posted h-1b jobs on a piece of paper on a board next to a restroom at the office. That was technically a publicly accessible area (if you had a guest pass).
Because if there's stock-based renumeration, it's 100% certain it applies and probably is considerable portion of renumeration of those deciding on layoffs.
Honestly, I'd preferably make it so that stock movement is frozen for a time except for laid off employees
I agree, if you are doing layoffs, you should be banned from the following year H1B visa lottery. If you really need some extraordinary guy, there other visas for that.
The US only has two political parties and they are both, secretly, pro immigration.
The EU is actually clamping down on it because of populist/far right parties. I know someone who runs a Thai restaurant and he cannot fly in a cook from Asia. He has to find someone from Europe.
It seems like you already understand what dual intent means- it's both a temporary working visa and a path to a Green Card. Yes, the government issues I-140s to H1-Bs, which are another step on the path to a GC. The government has an entire series of steps laid out for H1-B visa holders to follow to get a Green Card. I think just Googling 'H1-B dual intent' is going to give you more info than I could realistically fit in a comment here
> it's both a temporary working visa and a path to a Green Card.
It's not though. It's a DoS policy wrt of issuing non-immigrant visas.
>Yes, the government issues I-140s to H1-Bs
So? The government issues I-140s to non-H1Bs too. Not having any US visa and never having set foot in the US is "a path to Green Card" if H1B is one too.
>I think just Googling 'H1-B dual intent''
I was hoping you'd do that and find for yourself how wrong you are.
This might not be a fruitful discussion because I get the impression you're a bit ideologically dug in on this. I would like to think my subject matter expertise is reasonably high given that this intersects with my IRL job. But yes:
"Congress enacted INA § 214(b) in 1990, explicitly excluding H-1B visas (under INA § 101(a)(15)(H)(i)) from the presumption that nonimmigrant applicants are intending immigrants. Unlike most nonimmigrant categories requiring proof of no immigrant intent, H-1B omits any foreign residence requirement in its definition, enabling holders to pursue permanent residency without jeopardizing status" https://global.temple.edu/isss/faculty-staff-and-researchers...
"The Immigration Act of 1990 created the modern H-1B program as a "bridge" to green cards, allowing immediate work while navigating permanent residency processes that included labor tests. Senate Judiciary Committee reports emphasized streamlined H-1B procedures without recruitment delays to avoid productivity losses, with senators like Arlen Specter and Slade Gorton highlighting needs for quick access to skilled talent. This dual-intent design responded to prior issues, like the Schwartz case, where immigrant intent prosecutions prompted the 1990 carve-out" https://www.cato.org/blog/why-congress-rejected-h-1b-recruit...
I am just factually dug on this. You are correct that H1B applicants can intend to immigrate. It's what "dual intent" means. It does not mean the H1B is an immigrant visa or a "path to a Green Card" like you claimed originally. The CATO is not a government and them saying it's a "bridge" is not different than redditors saying so. This is why I asked you for a government statement. There is not one, because it's illegal to immigrate without an immigrant visa, which H1B is not.
"The key move was Congress’s amendment to INA §214(b), the provision that says every visa applicant is presumed to be an intending immigrant unless they prove otherwise. In 1990, Congress inserted an exception for H(i) and L nonimmigrants — i.e., it carved them out of that presumption. The current codification notes still show that this came from Pub. L. 101-649 §205(b)(1)" https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2009...
Congress also added INA §214(h). In the 1990 Act, that new subsection said, in substance, that being the beneficiary of a preference petition under §204, or otherwise seeking permanent residence, does not count as evidence that the person intends to abandon a foreign residence for H(i)/L purposes. That is the clearest statutory confirmation of dual intent.
"Congress originally intended H-1B to permit temporary work status while also allowing pursuit of permanent residence. The House Judiciary Committee report reinforces that reading. It had a section titled “Dual Intent” and explained that this problem was especially burdensome for H and L beneficiaries, and that the bill treated the filing of an immigrant petition as not, by itself, proof that the person meant to abandon a foreign residence" (attached link is the legislative history) https://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/wp-content/uploads/HR-...
You asked and LLM but don't seem to be able to understand the reply. Again, you proclaimed that dual intent means something else initially.
>"H-1B is “coming temporarily,” while permanent residence is handled through the employment-based immigrant categories in §203(b) and adjustment under §245(a)"
Exactly! Do you even read what you pasted from the prompt?
The EU is mostly clamping down on asylum seekers that are abusing the procedural rules, despite not having a solid claim on asylum.
Think of someone from a place that isn't nice enough, but well above the threshold of absolute shitshow with genocidal aftertaste that allows protection. Such people, by virtue of claiming to require asylum get temporary protection and right to residence and then clog the system by appealing everything ten times with the obviously foreseeable result of not being granted anything. The current idea that is supposed to solve everything is hosting the immigration ghettos offshore (surprise surprise) to not upset the local population until the positive decision is made.
Right populists are mostly riding the racist feeling and the idea that the actual legitimate asylum seekers are undesirable, because they are Muslim, because immigrants leech on the system and all that, plus the actually observable existence of ethnic (organized) crime.
All at the same time, the tech immigration is very easy as long as you get an offer. No quotas, no 100k shakedown, not even a degree requirement or a language test, just someone willing to fill the form and pay like 500 bucks in processing fees and pay you the above media salary. Family immigration isn't restricted either and partners of citizens and immigrants get right to work (because what else they would do here, lol).
But the actual non-fancy low-skilled low-paid immigrants are either EU citizens from less affluent side of the continent or the (former) asylum status holders (which is straight path to citizenship most of the time). Packages have to sorted, garbage trucks have to be driven and cheaply. But sure, anti-immigration attitudes we have.
So yeah, the only sure way to fly in a Thai cook is to marry her or give her husband a tech job.
Yeah, before open borders became a left thingy, it was called free market so local business gets that cheap labor. Now, once the profits are booked is the time of the classic switcheroo -- put the negative externalities on the society and blaming the left for trying to deal with them.
> asylum seekers that are abusing the procedural rules, despite not having a solid claim on asylum.
Out of curiosity, isn't that the same case as what happened with the Biden immigration surges, at least Venezuela? And now the current administration is taking action?
I'm not familiar with the American context enough to answer that. My understanding is that US was always very lax with immigration enforcement, where a lot of people are neither given the legal rights nor deported, while EU (mostly Western part of) was more willing to give some sort of legal residence, so people can pay taxes, fines and have incentive to learn the language. I don't really understand what was the problem with giving residence permits to the refugees from Venezuela in the first place, but again, I'm not familiar with this circus.
They weren’t that lax with immigration enforcement, Biden was the exception, Obama deported a ton of people, enough so to get the “deporter in chief” moniker.
Also, you can pay taxes without legally residing in the us it seems.
When you are puzzled about something, the first step is to find out why something works like it does. :)
With green cards, the government is concerned about permanent residents being dependent on the state if a company ceases to exist or fails to pay salaries or lays people off.
This worry is largely not present for limited term work visas.
What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.
This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?
No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!
Very few, probably. It only applies to consular processing, and only brand new petitions. And that’s ignoring the likelihood that all of this might get struck down by a court (on appeal) at some point given the administration’s propensity for breaking the law. EOs aren’t law on their own.
The fee only applies for consular processing, i.e., people outside the country.
There are a bunch of people in the country as students in US universities with an F visa. If they get a job, the employer can apply for an h1b, and the fee doesn't apply to them because they aren't getting a visa, they are changing status (might sound like potato/potata, but the difference exists and applies).
Remember that there was a "one-time fee" exception for "favored clients" (read: friends of Trump), who could pay a single lump-sum of something like $1 million, and then apply for unlimited H-1B's at the old fee structure.
I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…
There's certainly the 'National Interest Exception' which the President / DHS Secretary can extend to anyone they determine to be deserving of skipping the $100k fee;
Trump’s EO - 100K H1B applies only to applicants from India, which is what Indian IT companies mainly focus on.
Those who are in US or students on F1 visa are exempted and American companies like Amazon or FB or Google hire students or existing H1Bs.
> They filed H1Bs for 2025 and 2026, but not after or during the layoffs from last week
These kinds of layoffs don't just happen on a whim, certainly aren't supposed to. Oracle's business conditions really didn't change that much over the past year.
It's perfectly reasonable to retroactively question a company's choice to hire immigrant workers relatively shortly before layoffs.
The AI world is moving incredibly fast. A lot of SaaS company valuations are down. You can’t honestly say Oracle is operating in the same conditions as last year.
I don't understand why American workers would support this program at this scale. Furthermore, I believe universities and other similar researchy/affiliated non-profits are exempt from the hiring caps.
I just cannot imagine executives at tech companies/body shops having any positive ethical motivations. More like "they'll do what we say without complaining or they'll go home". There's no way it's not just a hugely abusive to both pools of workers. The whole thing really feels like another example of the imbalance between labor and capital in the US.
Who originally wanted H-1B/etc? Rich people with money and power? Of course!
To be clear too, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation. It can only end with disaster and more control/corporatism because lower-productivity workers does not produce higher long-term growth. Temporarily you are able to get your bonus and stock options from the spread between imported and native workers but, eventually, demand and supply stop (and the US reached this point a while ago, which is why central bankers and politicians have had to intervene heavily to keep it going).
The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.
About what? Are you familiar with how the life of a Chinese salaryman is going about for the last one year while us in the West are trembling in our shoes about how open weight Chinese models are threatening SOTA frontiers?
> Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation
Yes but what's the solution? To pass even more regulation against the large companies and make them behave?
> in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works
The Chinese were right about democracy being fundamentally corrupt.
To remove all regulation. Using economic policy to achieve social outcomes is insanity. Even the most free markets ultra would never suggest this, and you have people who are slightly to the left of communist suggesting this...it is worth asking why.
Switzerland and Italy. Two countries that are next to each other, very different story. Slovakia and Germany, adjacent (can't really use Austria because that is somewhere in the middle atm). At a high level, Eastern and Western Europe. Eastern Europe is thriving, Western Europe is struggling to decide whether to arrest people for committing crimes.
Owners are a minority of voters, which raises an obvious question: why does the majority tolerate it?
Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death.
If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
Because many people run on policies and then just don't follow up. Trump ran on "no more wars" and then started a war. Most people have such a team mindset they will choose denial over admitted they were duped, and then do it all again.
Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level.
150 years ago, if you told someone "oh if you want safer factories just build one yourself," that business would never survive because they'd get outcompeted by the less scrupulous factory owners who were happy to mangle their employees and just replace them with more desperate workers.
Right but you act like nothing can be done about that. If you outsource enough then don't count on the US government to protect you overseas. Go ahead and risk nationalization. The very fact that we are having this discussion shows how bad the situation is: companies can effectively threaten to move all their jobs overseas, thereby threatening US workers with economic ruin. That's not okay.
The government grants broad liability shields to owners of companies because there is a vested state interest in facilitating commerce/economic growth. I guess if companies are just going to move overseas then maybe those liability shields could just be vacated. They don't deserve to have their cake and eat it too. It's easy: want the liability shield? Stop being fucking greedy and be a good corporate citizen. Otherwise, no cake for you.
If you give companies the ability to choose US government protection against their overseas operations being nationalized versus the ability to hire foreigners on work visas, the overwhelming majority of companies will choose the latter.
Do you think it's a bad thing that the US implemented occupational safety laws?
I agree that it's not great that many of those risks just shifted overseas, but it's certainly a net positive that American employers can no longer let workers die or get permanently injured and just let the workers absorb those costs.
The H1B visa system isn't just a natural part of capitalism that I want the government to regulate. It's an artificial condition created by bad regulations. You can argue that we shouldn't have immigration restrictions at all since they're an artificial economic constraint, but that's a whole other argument.
I don't think it's specifically bad to have occupational safety laws, but overregulation in general has a choking effect.
By the time it'll take you to navigate the system to build anything physical in the US, you can have two iterations of the product in China.
The US way of handling this to go per incident and make one more rule, no matter how improbable that situation is. Eventually you end up with a system that needs a team of lawyers.
> Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level.
I have utmost respect of your work, a customer of your fantastic product and have been meaning to reach out to you for a while (infact I learned about Cory from your blog in 2021) but I had to push back hard on this.
TinyPilot didn't happen in India nor China. I can argue it would have been cheaper to build it at any one of those countries but you know much better about it than I.
Labor costs only matter when you're selling an absolute commodity that has no edge than price.
Of all the people I would have expected to say that the solution has to come at the regulatory level given the experience, success you've had, with your transparency in how your company was doing, I am utterly surprised it was you.
I am more than happy to continue, reached out - I just wish our initial email would have been way more pleasant!
To clarify, I certainly agree it's possible for a business to succeed without using H1B visas, especially for something small at the the scale of TinyPilot (7 people when I sold).
I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't.
What's the cost difference between a US citizen and an H1B? I'd guess it's something around 20% less expensive to hire an H1B visa holder. In an industry like software where the dominant cost is labor, then H1B companies have a 20% advantage over non-H1B companies. Non-H1B companies can outcompete them by being 20% better, but that's a big disadvantage to overcome.
Running my business actually made me oppose H1B visas more. The H1B visa system gives big businesses a massive advantage over small businesses. There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees, but you'll get ROI if you're hiring 10-20. But it just gives an advantage to bigger business, and the advantage wouldn't exist if the H1B system didn't exist or if the government designed it to be employer-agnostic.
> There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees
Very true but as you saw in my email, I have extremely experienced friends back in India who I have been able to hire as contractors without issue. No H1B - just plain old Slack, email and Forgejo. The playbook for asynchronous work is well tested and debugged by now. 2019 was a blessing.
I will concede, this doesn't work for every company - a hardware or biotech company definitely would appreciate people all being together in the same physical lab, in which case I hear you!
> the government designed it to be employer-agnostic
... but the government cannot be employer-agnostic, Michael.
The government is not an impartial, unbiased mainframe running in a DC somewhere. It's a group of people accepting and pushing policy who can be influenced, just like I am influencing your today, and you, me.
As an SMB and bootstrapped founder, you then have to choose between spending your time and efforts on being at the influencing table vs making actual design and business decisions at your startup the moment you yield influence to this group.
The bigger business simply doesn't have to make that decision. So don't help tip the scales further against yourself and SMBs like you.
That's one of my points that I was hoping to discuss in our email - that involving the government adds further overhead, resistance and expense into the system, so we should exhaust all other options before we even consider it. I personally have never seen an option that needed government intervention that couldn't be solved by the free market. I don't work in healthcare or education or finance - maybe those do require government intervention - I am entirely unfamiliar about those domains and not talking about them.
The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans. Sure, but the issue it isn't that way is because it's a rare "dual intention" visa in that, you are a non-immigrant who can become a citizen through the H1B. This was a feature added to the H1B to entice top quality talent. The problem with making the H1B employer-agnostic is that now you can I can start a perfectly legal, fantastic lifestyle businesses hiring H1Bs, petitioning for their greencards and immediately letting them go. As long as they can figure out a way to eat and sleep, they can now become citizens. So for it to be employer-agnostic, we need to remove the "dual intention" - the very carrot employers use (if you tough it out through all those JIRA tickets, you'll get to be a citizen!)
> I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't.
This is where I continue to push back. I was hoping to discuss over email but do you feel you could have built TinyPilot at either MS or Google, not as a side project but as an official product offering? I don't want to get too tied up into the specific features that TinyPilot offers - I'm using it as a proxy for a very useful, innovative product that provably solves real customer problems.
At the large scales where H1B makes sense, you as a major decision maker at the company wouldn't allow a worker with a risky status like the H1B be responsible for high impact, meaningful pieces of work. Actually, forget H1Bs - at the large scales where H1B makes sense, you would simply not entrust a single individual, H1B or not, with high impact, meaningful pieces of work.
If we disagree on this take, please say so - I am here to learn and listen.
The original intention of the H1B was to handle temporary supply shocks in knowledge work while the U.S. slowly fixed those supply constraints on its own.
If avocado toasts became an overnight sensation, the H1B was a way to provide breathing room to local avocado farms so the demand could sustain or grow (and not collapse) while they came up to speed to meet that sudden demand.
The H1B wasn't designed to be a way to absolutely wipe out local avocado farms because it's cheaper to just import avocados from Mexico.
The H1B has completely diverged from that and going in the opposite direction where it's actively and negatively impacting domestic markets. Massive corporations in Asia have grown whose sole business model is exploiting this geographical arbitrage and nothing else.
What piece of critical, useful software that has had a mention on HN can you name or recall that has come out of these many mutibillion dollar outsourcing giants?
A $60k/yr salary as a resident doctor is fantastic if you did most of your education in Asia but if you attended medical school anywhere in the U.S. and didn't have a 100% scholarship, you're starting your life off in crippling debt.
During COVID, there was an explosion of domestic coding bootcamps to address the supply constraints - this is precisely the kind of domestic corrections we, as the U.S. need to encourage and develop local talent, get them educated and motivated about tech, but these bootcamps require an investment that in Asia covers education, boarding and lodging without any scholarship. There's just no competition when it comes to cost. We in the U.S. have an extremely high quality of living and our CoL reflects that. As I wrote in my email, things we take for granted here - running water (not potable, just water that you could water your plants with), 24x7 electricity and internet - these are still unavailable where I was born, so of course, the CoL is cheaper. Way cheaper.
One might say, "OK then, free markets for the win" - that itself is a separate debate on its own.
Did you write a patronizing comment because you don't have an intellectual argument? Making comments about an abusive visa program isn't crying. Nowhere have I said immigrants are to blame, nor have I said that we should stop immigration.
The H-1B visa program is simply another element of the system that capital uses to abuse labor in the United States. It's not enough that healthcare (if you are even lucky enough to get any) is tied to employment. The low bar for bringing in foreign workers is used as a negotiating tactic by employers. There is no equivalent leverage for workers, absent economic ruin. This problem affects tens of millions of Americans and that's not normal and it's not okay. Maybe the law should allow H-1B visa, but also charge an absolutely huge premium (> $250k) that the company commits to worker healthcare or something. If the positions are so essential then $250k is still an incredibly good deal.
America has to start addressing the imbalance of power between capital and labor. It's gotten bad enough that one could easily argue that it's becoming a potent anti-democratic force in the US. And, I'm sorry, but Americans should not have to cede their desire for equal economic footing because people like you want intimate that it's about "not hiring immigrants".
Unfortunately, the current status quo and economic footing everyone enjoys in the US is built on this and similar exploitative behaviors explicitly enabled by the US government for its entire history.
How willing are you to sacrifice your standard of living for the purpose of labor gaining some foothold against capital? The GDP per capita of the poorest US states are more than virtually all socialist countries.
Most, if not all, politicians have a higher education of some kind. Higher education institutions make big money from international students, who only go for their overpriced education because of the possibility to work in the US. And it's not because the US employees prefer American education but because of OPT program, which let's one work in the country for 1/3 years depending on the degree (and it's cheaper to hire an OPT worker who is exempt from FICA taxes, paid by the employer for citizens and other visa categories) and then H1B.
Schools are the main beneficiary of the program: there are 1M foreign students in the country, each paying full tuition and living expenses. Without H1B the number would have been orders of magnitude lower. For example, in China, where education is literally 10x cheaper, there are just 0.25M foreign students, because there is no immigration pathway for those. So any politician trying to clamp down on this program would have to explain to his or her alma mater why does he or she hate it so much.
One way or another H1B's got in the door, a lot of them. And at this point they're just hiring themselves. OPT's as well, they will stack the candidate pools with only OPT/H1Bs. Post any job and you will get a flood of thousands of spam resumes. If you ignore them then you put yourself at risk of being accused of discrimination.
I work in Bellevue, WA, and there are a lot of Indians. How many are on H-1B? I I don't know. Anyway, I am a life long Democrat, but the Democratic Party needs to do something huge for American workers (like single payer healthcare) or we'll have Trump III or its equivalent or worse than that.
I don't think "American workers" are the target demographic of the Democratic Party though.
And yes, the next round will be "worse than Trump". The reality is Trump ran on certain principles that his voters adhered to, and he didn't deliver. The next logical step will be to support somebody even more "extreme".
Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. Trump was never going to deliver because he's the living, breathing embodiment of two things: Dunning-Kruger, and the ethos of disgusting corporate greed/abuse that's ruining the country. Trump and people like him are the most dangerous anti-democratic force ever assembled in America.
I actually have applied, and I got the offer. And I didn't take it. Because Oracle is known for poor working conditions.
Why can Oracle continue to hire good talent despite offering poor working conditions? H1-B.
Is it circular? Absolutely.
There really should be a strict maximum percentage of visa hires for any particular job type at a company. Say, 2x the overall average for that job category, and never to exceed 30%.
If they still need more labor, then they need to attract and train local talent rather than relying solely on overseas talent.
Do you think they would instead shift to India if these measures continue. The talent is there. 80% of the for talent is currently in US due to H1b but will move back to India. And it might be cheaper to just shift offices to India
No they won't. Oracle already has many teams that report to a people manager in India/Mexico/etc. and then dotted line report to another manager in the USA who actually calls the shots.
I was able to retire in my early 40s because Oracle paid early OCI engineers very well, in order to poach them from FAANGs. I wouldn’t recommend it now but “apply to Oracle for a job” did work out for some of us :)
I probably would if they had something in my area of expertise and decent pay/benefits. Then again, isn't the point of this exercise to avoid doing exactly that?
Where did my standard of living go? Couldnt possibly have to do with imported labor working around the clock under the threat of being kicked out of the country
For tech jobs specifically? Compensation has been increasing since the turn of the millennium, what standard of living do you mean? If you mean housing, that's due mainly to NIMBYism from native labor buying and owning houses, especially before the tech boom, not imported labor.
Cheap labour producing goods for the native population at low costs should increase your standard of living, no? It makes the products you buy cheaper.
By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.
Companies are importing labor so they can avoid pay competitive wages to native workers. If you need to hire people from other countries they should have the same pay and protections as everyone else.
That's way too naive, prices never go down, the owner pockets the difference, you pay the same, and once they come to your industry you have more competition
By your logic, slavery was one of the finest economic policies. Cheap labour, how about free labour? Have we thought of that? Everything would just be free.
In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.
Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).
China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).
People who are wondering about $100k fee- it only applies if you are bringing people from overseas for this job; meaning if an immigrant is already in the country (eg: on a student visa), they don't have to pay $100k. It's just a visa change for them. There have also been murmurs about pay-to-play system, not sure how it works though.
People who got pissed reading the title- majority of the visas sponsored were last year and not last week's layoffs.
I personally think that doing a layoff of more than 2% of your workforce or 1000 people, whichever is high, should restrict you from filing for a work visa for a period of 3 years.
Or you can buy your way out of that restriction by paying each laid off worker 3 years of wages.
I disagree, I think the $100k fee was a deliberate move to make sure the yearly allocation is only available to large companies like Oracle and out of reach of smaller startups.
Despite the rhetoric the administration is very friendly to big business and will absolutely help them hire cheaply. Larry Ellison especially.
Absolutely not. The current administration had a chance to do something really radical and they just completely fumbled it. They won't reopen this file.
They barely did anything. They could have done something great. They could have ended the program all together, they could have put a serious cap on it, they could have made the $100k fee a yearly fee, etc
But no, they did virtually nothing. I would even be surprised if more than 100 companies paid the one time $100k fee at this point with all the loopholes that were included.
I would absolutely not expect this, especially as long as Oracle and all the other technofeudalists are properly paying their taxes to the count and king.
All the new regulations (carefully presented as crackdown) make it easier for large companies to hire immigrants in a more reliable way. All carefully choreographed by big tech.
The chances of a specific company being able to sponsor a specific employee through this year's lottery went by significantly (3-4x) compared to the last several years.
Then the H-1B wouldn’t make sense. Many holders would have to transfer from one company to another, and if there is a $100,000 requirement, it would just lead to exploitation.
The better solution is just stop H1B lottery from next year.
Sadly I think you're wrong on this one. Trump's donors benefit from H1B cheap labor. Musk, Elison, etc contributed large sums to Trump's campaign. Just look at Musk's "fuck your own face" tweets from Dec 2024 and you'll see how the people with power feel about this issue. As usual the middle class is being squeezed by the oligarchy.
The 100k fee basically does nothing to curb H1B cheap labor. It's a one-time fee, and when you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job, it's a fee that easily pays for itself. H1B's are paid less for the same job (just google "are H1B's paid less"), and since they can't easily leave, the reduced turnover saves them money as well. If you think that an employee is likely to stay for 4 years, that's only 25k per year and the fact that they are paid about 15%-20% less than an American, the equation still easily comes out in favor of importing the cheap labor.
It was a move crafted to look like it was cracking down on abuse, but not actually cause any real pain to the companies abusing the system. Hence why all these mega corps are still filing for H1B's even while laying off their American citizen workers.
It was announced as such, but the administration quietly issued an update the day after it was announced “clarifying” that it was actually a one-time fee.
I find the topic of the morality or effectiveness of having a H-1B a little bit intractable to reason about rationally. Consider a simplified model of the system.
You have 2 countries, C1 and C2.
Scenario 1:
C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs.
C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
The wages of C1 go up because there is more demand than supply.
Scenario 2:
C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs.
C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
Now you put in a H1-B visa program that will pay the same as the prevalent wage as a local native.
C2 has enough candidates to fill the other 50 positions.
The wages of C1 will NOT go up because now supply matches demand.
Is Scenario 2 fair? Who gets to decide what fair is? Given the above system, I think I would argue that H1-B visa programs cause wage deflation in C1, even if it is filling jobs that would not be filled and even if the jobs paid the exact same as someone working in the native country.
I am not dogmatic about that though. Willing to hear a counterpoint to scenario 2.
Scenario 2 now has country C1 with 100 tech workers, and they got their pick of the 50 best workers from (lower paying) country 2.
Country 1 is now a better place to start a new company or expand your existing company because all the best workers in the field work in country 1. Starting the same business in country 2 will almost certainly fail.
This is literally why the Bay Area became the world’s most important tech hub and isolationism will allow (and is allowing) Chinese tech to jump ahead of the US. The government doesn’t care about losing a literal arms race, largely to reduce the political power of California. By no longer educating and welcoming the world’s brightest engineers the USA is going to be reduced to support and manufacturing roles where its large workforce will have to compete with everyone else and salaries will tumble.
1. Companies can hire overseas. There's some cost to it in terms of added friction, but if wages rise enough in C1, then it's worth the friction to hire in C2 instead.
2. Workers also consume and invest, raising demand for other jobs. Employment is not a zero sum game, especially at the macro scale.
Scenario 2 makes sense. I think the counterpoint people bring up is to just stick to Scenario1 and let the salaries go up and let people jump ships every now and then for a raise but they forget that C1 is a ultra-capitalist country.
What is the difference with new visa applications? H1B are supposed to be temporary when a company can't find employees in the country. Renewals are not meant to be automatic.
Renewals for people who are already working for an employer. Renewals don’t require searching for an american employee.
Also, h1-b is limited to 6 years (one renewal) unless I-140 (green card) has been filed for the employee. In which case, renewals become unlimited until green card is granted.
For Indians the GC queue is nearly infinite, hence too many renewals.
My question was rhetorical. Renewals shouldn't be treated differently from new applications in spirit.
The H1B worker is meant to temporarily fill a gap. If there is available US talent, the H1B worker should leave and be replaced by a citizen/permanent resident.
> The H1B i140 petition thing requires you to advertise the job before submitting the petition.
You're confusing things. I-140 is a green card application, not H1B.
H1B petition requires the I-129 form and an LCA from the DoL. No advertisement is required, except posting the LCAs in a conspicuous place in the company office.
Keep in mind that employers have to pay $100,000 in visa fees (in addition to competitive salaries) for each H-1B visa. Clearly these immigrants are not undercutting US workers. It is $100K cheaper to hire a US worker.
H1B is used to hire the best talent that gets paid big bucks as well as cheap talent that is paid less. Both are true. It depends on the company.
I haven't seen Google or FB or Amazon or other top tech companies pay H1B any less. They get paid pretty well.
But firing people (some might be on H1B too) and hiring H1B at the same time is meaningless.
Btw, if you want to stop people from getting fired, J Powell needs to be fired. He is keeping interest rates high for any sort of hiring. These same companies hired like crazy during 0% interest rate environment.
I've worked at Google and Amazon. Both paid H-1B less than their american counterparts. In particular because the H-1B workers didn't jump companies as frequent.
All H1B salaries are posted online. First of thats the law.
Google , Facebook etc all post salaries of every H1B application. The salaries are always in top 5% of Software engineering salaries.
You are making stuff up or ignorant of H1B process.
Lowering interest rates to juice the economy is done when unemployment rises … which hasn’t happened yet in the wider economy.
Juiced economy and free cash is what led to massive inflation. Powell is trying to save hay until winter - when we get a recession the interest rates cuts are the only knob he has to turn to soften the blow.
He inflated the market on purpose for longer than needed. Every economist was screaming to stop and he also played games during elections by lowering interest rate when it was not needed. This only resulted in rates being higher for longer.
What I don't get is, how does this economically make sense? Isn't there a 100k fee for h1bs now? So 3k h1bs would cost $300 Mil... Before you even start paying salary
If you want to hire an H1B and claim there is no American to do that job, what about the 30k employees you just laid off? None of them can do the software engineering, sales, HR, etc. that a company like Oracle works on 99% of the time? It's quite schizophrenic for basic engineering companies like Oracle, Cisco, eBay, Paypal, etc. to claim there are no Americans to do the software engineering they require after they lay off thousands and there are millions of American software engineers looking for work.
No, the requirement is that the job is for a speciality occupation and that the H1B be paid the prevailing wage for that job, not that there was an attempt to hire locally first.
For an I-140 PERM (employment based green card) however the requirement is that there was an effort made to hire locally first.
Most people on HN are uninformed about this, well actually uninformed in general.
The jobs filled via H-1B are not “specialty” positions, everyone knows this. I know that’s what the visa is ostensibly supposed to be used for, but it’s a very silly thing to pretend at this stage. I agree that many are uninformed on this, and my friends who don’t work in tech think someone on an H-1B visa is like a “particle physics PhD” or something, and not “database administrator” or “backend engineer”.
They have many departments, and are probably reducing some of them while increasing the workforce in others. The idea that they hire 'those damn foreigners' to push down wages is probably true to some degree, but not the whole story. I also don't believe the majority of these H1B are directly hired in other countries for which there is now a $100k fee, but rather people who studied in the US under F1 visa who are exempt from this rule.
What magical skills do the "damn foreigners" have that none of those 30,000 laid off employees don't have? What was the intent of the H1B? To find skills that don't exist in this country. What is H1B actually used for? Labor arbitrage, nepotism, kickbacks. There's really no excuse for defending it anymore.
H-1B exists to make unfathomably rich corporations and people even more unfathomably rich. That's the only reason. That's why we don't have single payer. How can corporations function if employees don't equate job loss with total economic and social ruin?
Not necessarily.
Many of the technological revolution started with refugees and immigrants before, during and after ww2. And technically you should even count the NZ that were brought to create the rocket programs
Anyway, I feel that you need read this guy comment
I appreciate the information. However, labor Arbitrage affects millions of American workers. It probably affects tens of millions. I just cannot fathom that companies today have any positive ethical reasons for wanting to participate. It gives them another stick to use against both groups of workers. Also, H-1B was started in 1990, so well after World War II.
These are union jobs where hours worked don't extend beyond 50 hours including overtime and with significantly lower barrier to entry compared to software.
Why should American SWEs earn more than Accountants (around $80k), Teachers (around $70k), or Mechanical Engineers (around $80k)?
It's this kind of attitude that makes non-techies feel schadenfreude.
Techies moan and moan, yet in reality we became the capital elite - a median TC of $190K [0] does make you the capital elite in a country where the median household income is $80k [1]. Even investment bankers have a similar TC to SWEs [2] - especially if you don't work for a Bulge Bracket or Elite Boutique.
I hate Oracle as much as the next guy, but this seems like a nothingburger.
Oracle didn’t file “thousands of H1Bs”. Oracle filed 2690 applications in FY2025 (Oct-Sep), and so far filed 436 in FY2026, according to the article.
If anything, this would indicate that Oracle slowed down on hiring foreign workforce. Oct-Mar is half of Oracle’s fiscal year, but they only filed 16% of the H1B applications as in 2025? That seems in line with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoff.
Oracle laid off 12,000 people in India as well. What is this news on about? If all they wanted was cheap labor, why would they fire people in India and then also bring H-1B from overseas and pay them more?
Until maybe 2 years ago absolutely. Huge demand for tech workers and not enough smart US workers to fill the roles… lots of low quality candidates from crappy colleges but anyone with skills or smarts (and not unreasonable salary expectations) got a job.
Since the ai data center cash suck the jobs have dried up… ai productivity gains maybe too, although we’re waiting to see meaningful results there.
From a recruitment perspective it’s still difficult to find experienced candidates with specific skill sets because any job openings get flooded with 10,000 ai generated slop applications that have to be screened by ai and the 10 excellent candidates get lost.
In my observation, job market wasn't great even before ai. AI made it worse by clogging existing channels - already not that great - with a ton of slop.
This is unnecessarily incendiary, didn't get passed the first paragraph because this is so misleading:
> Oracle [...] has filed thousands of petitions for H-1B visas in the past two fiscal years, even as it lays off thousands of American workers
Oracle is laying off workers of _all_ nationalities, not just Americans. I know people at Oracle with H1B visas that were laid off. Trying to paint it as if they're replacing Americans with foreigners is just unnecessary fear mongering.
It's very sad how illiberal hackernews gets when it comes to H-1B visas and immigration in general. People will say that they are concerned about the welfare of H-1B holders because they can't leave their jobs but I've literally never heard anyone suggest an improvement (better portability, etc). Instead all anyone talks about is how bad it is that they have to compete against people from around the world. I think people are just afraid of a true meritocracy and maybe that's a bearish signal for the industry overall.
That's a silly comment. A simple search would show you that commenters often highlight that H1B are used to "chain" temporary workers to their job. And in past years, many called for changes to allow H1B workers to change jobs more easily.
However, we are not in the same economy we were 5 years ago. The job market is very tough and the H1B program makes less sense every day.
Why would Americans have to compete with the rest of the world exactly? The purpose of a country is to serve and protect its citizens first, not become a giant open bar for the entirety of humanity.
Bizarre and entitled comment. It is not a human right to immigrate to the United States. The government here is supposed to set policies that are for the betterment of people who are from here. It’s not anti meritocracy to observe that it’s insane and stupid to pretend that every college grad in the United States needs to compete, in their own home country, with a billion people from India and China for work. The only “illiberal” thing I notice when this topic comes up here is that people seem to think the laws of supply and demand don’t apply when we talk about immigration, and thus there’s no effect on wages (wrong). Something must’ve changed, though, since that sentiment is mostly absent in this thread.
You didn't even try to read the comments to get a context.
You assumed you were being attacked and you need to hate immigrants.
You are just being manipulated.
> Federal data shows the tech giant filed for over 3,000 foreign worker visas as it cuts thousands of American jobs.
Just trying to understand what context you feel is relevant here...
Even if Oracle is also firing people in India the idea that no American can do these jobs in the US should be challenged.
Let's assume they do need extremely specialised skills for these roles and are struggling to find those skills in a highly educated country like the US so need to look for employees in countries like India, the question you should then be asking is, well, if they couldn't hire from abroad what would they do instead?
Perhaps they would need to give someone who recently graduated a chance? Perhaps they would try to train people working in adjacent fields at Oracle? Maybe they would increase the salary so American's with these skills employed elsewhere would switch jobs?
So can you steal-man why I should be in favour of companies hiring abroad given there are clearly smart and educated people in the US who are looking for work or might be tempted to work for Oracle if they offered better salaries or training?
Can you explain the advantage to the US workers in allowing this?
The MAGA crowd will be ecstatic. They get fired while their president's buddy gets to hire new workers that are cheaper and more susceptible to extortion. Be careful what you vote for.
There was no option to vote for which was actually pro-worker. The other side is just as in-favor of these "high skilled" visas, and also even more pro mass-migration of all kinds. The previous admin sued Texas and Arizona to take down their border walls, and sent forklifts to literally open the barbed wire at the border.
There is no evidence that the alternative party would have done anything about this issue.
It is obvious that both parties are completely detached from the interests of their constituents.
We've had the opportunity to have EVerify as federal minimum standard to employment for nearly 4 decades, and it's been shot down multiple times by both parties.
That's MAGA for you. They're not even complaining (very much) about super high gas prices. They absolutely excoriated Biden when the price went up even a nickel. MAGA will sacrifice absolutely anything for their king.
All foreigners, pay attention to the people in this thread. They will often ask you to form unions with them. But what would such a union do? Well logically it would do what these people are asking them to do. And what do you see around you? Does it look like they're in favour of you. Do you think you'd be better off?
Remember that the Hyundai workers in Georgia were deported at the best of the local union. Right now, foreigners are a large portion of this field's workforce. If you are to join with a union, you will rapidly find that it absorbs the remainder of the workforce through being "a union shop". You will rapidly find that such a union will expand to include all these people. And then they will ask for you to be deported. It wouldn't be the first time. The reason Chinese and Indians couldn't be citizens for a long time is because the predecessor to today's AFL-CIO lobbied to block that.
Choose wisely. The danger is looking you right in the face and saying "I am the danger".
It wouldn’t be the first time that “labour” found itself completely undone through idealistic foolishness. Bernie Sanders wants to end the H-1B with no replacement lined up. Labor was slain by the Ayatollah in Iran.
If you’re a foreigner, pay attention to this commenter. He is fairly typical of who your fellow union member will be if you decide to join a union. If you are on a H-1B note that you will have to leave.
Understand carefully the consequences of joining a union. Once empowered this is what will happen to you. Keep your eyes wide open. Remember what the Ayatollah did to his young anti-shah allies.
- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
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