Hacker News Reader

I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.

View on HN

Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.

The difference now is many companies have offices offshore with their own management. This isn’t the old offshore consulting to save a few bucks now. This is company employees who just cost a lot less. Once AI becomes more mature this will accelerate rapidly. Companies are going to do whatever they can to reduce labor costs. Always have.

It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.

I wouldn't say it's unprecedented, since I first heard about a call center in Texas that was over 90% foreign labor several years ago. But it's certainly gotten worse.

I suspect that some companies/policymakers may be trying to flood the market, so to speak, in case importing them gets harder in the future or a bunch get sent home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com