Companies are lying about AI layoffs?

A firm's headcount is a dynamic value that is reflective of a rate of growth: its headcount is going up by x% each year, ideally linear growth or at least not a higher rate of growth than revenues or free cash flow. It requires an accounting perspective on the inflows and outflows of an ongoing process and not just a small slice of data. If you just look at that firm's hiring and firing in a particular year, subtracting the one from the other, you would appear to have shown that the firm was more or less simply replacing the other with the one. Yet, the main question for actually measuring the (firm and investor expected) impact of AI is whether that rate of headcount growth has changed without the stock price going down. That is, is it now proposed by management and accepted by investors that the firm will henceforth require less human labor in order to deliver on the present expected value of future free cash flow. You cannot infer anything about this question from the data shown.

There certainly is a separate question of whether a firm has changed its source of new hires, but that also isn't reflected in the data, which just shows approved visas against layoffs. For this, you would need to look at net hires year after year and prove that a growing percent thereof are H1-Bs.

If anything the biggest H1B user - amazon - seems to have done negligible layoffs.

This practice hurts all state side workers, citizen and h-1b alike.

- Layoffs would have happened anyway, natural cycle of shedding underperformers.

- the current crop of graduates have too little AI experience from their education, and too little practical experience to be useful in an industry re-arranging itself.

- the average developer quality (i.e. boot camps & curriculum) has dropped the value of "a developer" from a manager's perspective, up to the point that an average Actual Indian is competitive (even when accounting for the communication overhead/loss).

Combined, that shows fewer people on the books, which they'll obviously frame in the best light; i.e. frugal & good management + innovative AI.

This is going to either surprise management or, more likely, have them obfuscate the work done in order to hide certain details of poor performance.

The best workers will have to be compensated somehow, so there will be some opaque org chart setup to allow it.

Skills aren’t interchangeable and there is no universal hiring pool called “IT” under which you can hire anyone with an engineering degree and so an H1B swap becomes the only answer.

There are a large number of pools of specializations that fall into and out of favor with time, with people transitioning between them (as they should!). AI has fallen into favor and some frontend/backend jobs have fallen out. Is this what this data shows? Maybe? We’d never know.

1. Extensions - H1B is approved for years. Once that period is complete employers need to extend it for another 3 years.

2. Amendments - This will include new job/employer. So, this does mean new H1B employee on the payroll but not exactly new H1B being brought from India.

3. New Hires - Completely new H1B hires.

For example, Google's count might include a rolling set of employees requiring H1B extension before they file I-140 petition, H1Bs from Infosys jumping ship to Google for a handsome pay increase and new H1B employees. So, there is no 1:1 comparison.

That said, I know Google departments being offshored but mostly due to the software tax code change in US. That has now been rolled back. So, hiring should pick up a bit.

As pointed in the H1B fees threads - Corporations always look to maximize benefits. If Accenture and their US clients think that their contracts will be cheaper if they have 3 H1B employees instead of 10 and let rest 7 work out of India, then that is what they will do. H1B fees is just going to make things worse. There is no good way to stop this globalization.

That said I think Accenture story is full of air. Its right there in the article > It is not immediately clear how much Accenture intends to invest in setting up the campus.

Look at the data: e.g a company like Rippling where a good portion of Software engineering jobs are in India. then Senior / Staff Roles are in the US. Most scale ups startups have similar dynamics. It could be India or Eastern Europe.

That's the A.I eating software jobs.

1) Companies can find comparably trained and educated workers in non-US countries at cheaper rates because the U.S. education system doesn’t discriminate against less performant students. The education systems in many other countries are competitive at various stages and serve as strict filters against laggards, and there’s less consideration for meeting basic human needs in some countries. But in others there are different options where many students naturally find themselves (like less paying or blue collar work), and if that were to happen in the U.S. then inequality advocates will have a lot to say, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

2) There are a lot of realpolitiks at play when you have a multicultural society as people will often have dual allegiances. A CEO or hiring manager from country X or Y will want to favor their country of origin, naturally. It becomes easier to justify some decisions when the bottom line is also helped by said decisions by hiring cheaper labor.

3) The most expensive thing on the U.S. budget books for employers, employees and the government is social security and Medicare. Some countries simply deny their citizens and workers social security and access to welfare programs, which helps keep the cost of employing them down.

4) Even if a global corporate tax rate is set, it will still make labor in countries that don’t ask for social program contributions much cheaper.

5) The rule of law situation in some of these countries is less than ideal, and so living there can be a hit or miss, which is why H1-Bs are a popular choice for both employers and non-U.S. employees.

6) But still it seems that regional security and stability in some regions has led to permissive environments for unrestricted work. This situation isn’t going to change for nuclear countries, unless they’re like Russia (screwed by economic sanctions and expansionist desires).

So in the short-term, unless there’s some agreement to be made between countries for balancing their labor market loads, then economic sanctions seem like a terrible last resort.

Addendum, I think the hard truth for large cap companies is that they never should have been allowed to get that big, and in many cases their growth was aided by direct investment by the U.S. government. There’s an interesting lesson here for policy makers about balancing power and investments. Maybe the U.S. should divert future government spending to only its research labs.

But that is exactly the point. H1B workers aren't workhouse workers. They are doing tech work. Saying companies are doing lay off and hiring H1Bs doesn't in any way establishes what kind of workers are getting laid off and what kind of workers are getting hired.

As others have pointed it out, the data presented is so insufficient to such a degree that in this particular case, I have to wonder if this is genuine curiosity of the author of the post or if they are trying to justify their beliefs using bad data science.

I imagined how profoundly impossible it would have been for someone on an H1B visa to do this whose immigration status is contingent on their employment. Scary.

Which means if the company hires a replacement for the same position including through a sponsored visa, then it's not a genuine layoff.

Nonetheless, I'm of the opinion that no single software engineer has yet lost their job to AI. It's simply not there yet.

Ok someone explain to me exactly how they do that, because when I looked into working in America H-1B is a lottery (with 30% win rate) and it only happens once per year.

How exactly do these companies hire people with those constraints?

In Prometheus' term, the "beneficiaries approved" is neither a counter nor a gauge. It doesn't tell you the percentage of H1b holders amongst all full time employees and certainly don't include H1b contractors. It also don't include other temporary visa types like L1 or H4, both could be "cheap foreign labors".

The "# of layoffs" also doesn't provide much information about how many H1b holders are part of the layoffs.

The goal of combining the two columns seems to be giving reader a fuzzy feeling that they are correlated, to support the author's narrative.

Both can be true. The Indian takeover of tech probably also fuels racism.

The problem is that hiring an American is so expensive even for America. This will not change. People will need to accept to earn much less than they expected or to have the jobs taken elsewhere.

The root cause of the problem is exactly why Chinese clone products and cheaper versions are on the run. They are in inferior quality many times BUT they are way cheaper. American people buy Chinese products because there is not enough money to spend everywhere, so we stretch our definitions of what is acceptable to cover more areas of our lives.

These recent changes only seems to be effective but do effectively nothing to solve any of the problems. But let's say magically all immigrants disappeared and companies needed to find replacements, what would happen?

- Companies will look to outsource to keep prices at same level - Companies will use AI for whatever is "good enough" - Companies will hire much less capable people and boost them with AI - Companies will hire capable people but pay less because they could have hired someone cheaper - Companies will be forced to pay more for Americans, mean average salary will increase so as every cost, which is basically inflation.

The expedite use of "urgent/emergency" measurements is unsettling as-if US was under constant attack and panic and needs to defend themselves against evil outside world to a level where congress and laws can be totally ignored.

This need of creating an enemy and the constant threat to solidify a heavy power that goes beyond any limits is in itself a threat. Even more now that a this power is being shared among those who can keep eyes and ears on you and your ears and eyes out of the real problems.

It's all over for American tech dominance. MBAs sold us all out.

One of the worst parts, in my opinion, is how the author misunderstands the meaning of "Actually Indians," which is about the data labeling workforce, not the white collar technical workforce.