Comment by hshdhdhj4444 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hshdhdhj4444 | Hacker News Reader

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No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers speak for themselves.

Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country.

https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer...

When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues.

That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India.

You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India.

Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.

Here you go, h1b hires still get paid American salaries so that throws the whole 'they get hired because they are cheap' argument out of the window: https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-tru...

>70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself.

Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.

Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B hiring.

I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.

It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.

That's a commonly made argument, but it's innumerate. Low h1b salaries lower local salaries. The reason you hire h1b is because they're cheap, and then the only locals you hire are the ones that will work at the price of h1bs.

Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)

> hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.

No it doesn't, not materially anyway. Stats can be misleading if you don't pay attention. A lot of the big corps started hiring H1-B in large numbers long ago but since H1-Bs can't easily switch jobs and tend to suck up to higher-ups, soon their mid-management was occupied by H1-Bs.

Anybody who has tried to find a job in such an environment knows the drill - Indian managers hire only Indians and prefer H1-Bs to keep them docile. Salary isn't a consideration there, but it all starts with "cheap" and is sustained by ethnic loyalty and fear of the outsider.

In smaller companies where hiring is more natural, H1-Bs are still payed less and their inability to switch jobs makes them cheaper still.

> I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.

Same bias happened when manufacturing moved to China. However, no whining on HN since at the time, blue-collar American red-necks were getting their just deserts.

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