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Comment by trenning | Hacker News Reader

All corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”.

Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.

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No one is going to say it but the (effective) end of the H-1B visa program means that tech companies are going to start staffing up more teams where the talent is.

Doesn’t Amazon have 10k+ H-1B workers? “How many workers on visas will they lay off” is an interesting question to understand their internal HR strategy.

Until the government turns to dealing with offshoring. Lot more appetite in both parties to attack that business practice.

And how would they do that? The available methods - tax penalties mainly - are too easy to dodge.

make them harder to dodge

Yup. This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem. Only a few hundred companies are capable of the level of outsourcing that is considered significant. And those companies are highly sensitive to regulatory demands

"This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem"

Epic handwave. And you're wrong btw. If anything small business outsources even more than large companies. Tons of small business owners have zero US employees but have a personal assistant/CX agent in the Philippines, IT contractor in Latam, design contractors in Eastern Europe, etc.

What's the "dodge" here? All these companies already have a large presence in other countries. They can adjust employee counts in each of these locations as they see fit.

Let's say you make companies pay a tax per non-US employee. So they transfer the non-US employees to a contractor, and pay the contractor. This is often the default arrangement anyway. What do you do now?

You would need China-level capital controls to make this work and that is not compatible with the dollar remaining as a reserve currency. Nor will Congress or the Supreme Court go for it.

There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.

A bigger pool of candidates gives you access to more 'talent'. Unless you design an interview process that is somehow biased towards US citizens, you'll always get better candidate on average from the rest of the world.

Perhaps it was less expensive to hire offshore, but if importing foreign talent isn't an option anymore, the tradeoff will change and US companies will have to expand their foreign offices (which I personally hope).

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