We aren’t an AI tech group or anything like that. I was on a Z (working) visa in China for 9 years though.
I knew an H1 in another group from an obviously second rate school in China and a masters from a no name in America. He was pretty successful in his career so I guess school brand doesn’t mean that much. Likewise when I was in China some of the PhDs from second rate Chinese universities also did very well.
- Tech or engineering company hires foreign resident engineer.
- That engineer works their way up in the company to a position where they are in control of hiring.
- They hire more people like them.
We used to accuse start-ups for hiring for cultural fit (people like them) which looked like sexism and ageism. Same thing, different group.
Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.
The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.
The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.
However immigrants are a net increase in investment and GDP. Yes - terms and conditions apply (its economics, when do they not)
Immigrants have to pay rent, buy clothes and groceries from wherever they live. This creates demand which depends the consumption economy. These are positive growth levers. This is despite whatever work they do in that region.
In contrast, asset prices like house prices rising, because they have become stores of wealth, are a different deal altogether. In that situation house owners benefit from just holding onto property, and not renting. The asset appreciates all the same.
The issue which can be brought up is wage depression, and paying immigrants under the table. This should depress wages for American labour.
One solution for this is to increase minimum wage, and to ensure that everyone is paid minimum wage.
This is a simplified model of the situation, but in general immigrants put more into the system than they take out.
Yea, keep that same energy and see how it plays out.
"They also pay the social security and Medicare taxes so listless rednecks can collect SSDI for being unable to work."
Their billable rates ranged from $44-76/hr in 2022. The people in the cafeteria probably made more. They get minimum viable salary like indentured workers in hopes of getting a green card and more opportunity.
The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.
This thinking is wrong. For IT jobs, the work is pre-defined and you go find people who can do the job. For product development this is sometimes the case, but for truly innovative products, such as AI models, this is not the case. You have to hire the best in the world and give them the resources they need, as opposed to defining the project upfront and hiring people "who can do the job".
I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s. Based on nothing but an old geocities post some rando put up about training a model to only unlock a pet door for their cat.
I implemented the same and it worked.
Where you see true innovation I see run of the mill. OpenAI, Google, etc are propping up data center rental business they came to rely on to titillate biology with whatever spaghetti that sticks. That's it.
The interesting science isn't happening anywhere close to big tech.
The mathematics of LLMs exists in textbooks from 1950s. Your entire comment chain here is little more than reciting propaganda.
Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?
If your powers of analysis were worth anything you would be running the world not copy-pasting hype straight from CNBC and Big Tech PR
As you are not running the world your analysis is worthless. As such I say; good day, sir.
(I’m not opposed to immigration at all but it was transparent how for decades the industry resisted any change which would make it easier for a skilled H1-B worker to take a better job)
Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.
That H1B labour allowed other firms to build tech, which kept those firms competitive, creating a deeper economy and experienced bench.
That depth then enabled more advanced tech firms to be born.
At least thats what I think they are saying.
The analogy would be that China took over low tech manufacturing, and then because of that were able to develop expertise to move up the value chain.
At the same time, supply demand curves are real. If you have more workers, it should result in competition that drives down wages. (ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL)
There was a distinction being made between Tech and IT, which I am not too sure about.
So software engineer salaries have gone up dramatically in the last 35 years H-1B visa has been around. In fact, the H-1B visa is the reason the salaries have gone up. Without it the industry would be stagnant, just like non-tech S&P 500 companies and most companies in Europe in the same time period.
As others have said, H1-B has been good for companies, and bad for American workers. The same companies who were found to be colluding to keep wages down.
Europe is stagnant because of regulation, not because of immigration.
I am saying the reason silicon valley exists is because of the immigration of the smartest people from around the world. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US.
Consider the seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need"). It was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration been bad for American workers? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, without them the center of tech would be Beijing.
Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.
Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz
Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.
The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.
How would you like to make t-shirts for rich Chinese, for $5 an hour? There is a reason Americans are not doing that. It is because we are smarter than the rest of the world. How do you think that happened? Were all the smart people born here? Nope. It is because smart people born around the world immigrated here. The prosperity they bring doesn't only help high tech workers, it feeds the economy, so everyone benefits.
Let them lose.
Google and the rest do not prop up humanity. They prop up a financial engineering Ponzi scheme.
You're just parroting media and social tropes you grew up with.
We could assert in our children social truth about other forms of economics; for example, healthcare as a tent pole rather than stock valuations; still requires technology and jobs and we don't remain the last modern economy on the planet without universal healthcare. We're losing to Russia and China in healthcare.
But thankfully we win when the metric phallic rockets to nowhere and Google search uptime?
You should consider your economic benchmarks and their provenance; a bunch of self selecting biological organisms that we socially describe as billionaires have convinced you via their fear mongering that if we don't give them all the power giant foot will step on us
Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads.
Downvote all you want, it's the truth.
I understand that you are pissed off (as am I too) but debating with an army of bots, LLMs, wankers and Russians is unfortunately the status quo, quotidien.
On the bright side there are lots of lovely folk hereabouts with a large thing between their ears.
That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot
Like imagine if there was some 90 minute tech documentary on Netflix that was worth discussing here. Could I just rip it and link to a copy on my Google Drive? How long would that link stay up? I can't imagine long. I guess the conclusion based off how these sites operate is that piracy doesn't count when it's just words.
Heck, I find it odd that we don't even try to model the problem, let alone solve.
For example, there's no submitter-tickbox for "this requires additional access", no icon to distinguish between the kinds of items, and and we don't even an informal convention like putting [paywall] in the title.
Without even tracking that information, it's very difficult to address the pain-points, such as allowing the submitter to preemptively provide alternate links, or allowing readers to select against certain sites they've already decided they won't subscribe to.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Regarding the second link, I'll happily engage with something specific dang said on this topic if you want to link to it, but a link to every time he said the word "paywalls" is not a productive contribution to this conversation.
I would prefer to just skip them, but they are not easy to spot.
What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard.
Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it.
Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value.
I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.
So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.
Maybe we've had different experiences.
But I am skeptical that people who have not seen a complex corporate environment understand how different it is.
In banks its rather 10%, at least in mine is.
So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour.
It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.
There were companies growing organizations faster than they could be made productive. They acquired a lot of bureaucracy, excess structure, and inefficiency. The current backlash is trying to reverse the excess structure and middle management buildout so they can get back to more functional teams.
When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable.
When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable.
Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.
"labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes."
No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
"more of".
If you wanna finesse the discount rate by a few percentage points go ahead. Cash flows contribute more toward the end value number.
in b4 some numpty writes about the fed changing a market set rate.
The rate of non-tech business growth has slowed, who is going to continue to buy all these cloud software services? Tricking consumers into subscribing to AI tools or extra storage only goes so far.
I very much agree.
A lot of tech job growth during the late 2010 and pandemic period were frankly BS for a ROI perspective. Late 2010s was really the first time in tech that I started to feel like most of the stuff that needed to be built was built, and increasingly I was working on BS projects offering less and less value every year.
Consider:
- In the 80s developers were needed to write fundamental business software for word processing and spreadsheets
- In the 90s computers became mainstream and there was a huge demand for consumer software
- In the 00s the internet took off and we needed people build the web
- In the 10s the smart phone revolutionised computing and we needed people to build apps and rebuild websites to be mobile-first
But towards the late 10s entrepreneurs and investors seemingly ran out of no-brainer tech investments so increasingly started trying mental stuff still promising tech-like returns – block-chain, metaverse, Web 3.0, [insert traditional industry here] but a tech company.
I'm not saying there's nothing to build or maintain anymore, but I also no longer see where people think the exponential need for new software and software developers could come from, and I suspect this would have become obvious earlier if it wasn't for ZIRP.
But it's not a lack of productive things to build. We also have other trends hurting demand for new SWEs today. Consider how today completely non-technical people can start and scale an ecommerce company without any developers. Things that would have taken armies of developers just 10-15 years ago, can now be largely done in an afternoon on platforms like Shopify. It's actual hard to believe that just 15 years ago selling things online used to be very hard if you weren't technical.
Similarly starting in the early 2010s even being a developer got significantly easier because increasingly there was packages for everything. Things I might have spent weeks building before could now be built in days or less. And another thing that changed was sites like stackoverflow and blogs which help you solve problems and learn new skills. I remember trying to learn how to do things before 2010s was hard, and before the 00s it very hard.
And of course now we also have AI coding tools which don't just hurt the overall demand for developers, but effectively expands the supply of developers to anyone with an internet connection and computer.
So to summerise:
- There's much fewer good investments to be made in new software today.
- Where there are investments to be made you need far less developers.
- When you need developers there's far more people who can do the job.
Even if tech companies are doing well and the number of tech jobs is increasingly, the above means the average person trying to find a job in tech today will find it much, much harder than they have in the past. People working in tech today genuinely should consider a career change if they're primarily in tech for the money.
I mean, I feel like we've barely touched on what applications AI could be used in, that we have only just begun to start developing. It's tech that can be used in more advanced robotics, video games (adaptive NPCs, PCG, narratives), better data analysis, search, and more.
I understand the fears and dislikes around AI at the moment, but I think people need to understand that it can never fully replace human labor. At least, I am not concerned about that aspect in the slightest. To me, the real thing to fear isn't so much the tech itself, but our fellow man, and the ways they might possibly use it against others.
These companies need liquid cash to invest in AI infrastructure, and so they're doing mass layoffs to give them the capital to invest. Simple as that.
2022-2024 was COVID reset. 2025-2027? is reallocation of spending from R&D to infrastructure.
Block, for example, said that they had experienced record profits… in spite of their, “hiring spree.”
This is just capitalism working as usual, only more of it, faster.
AI has a part in it. So does austerity policies and the rise of a certain political climate.
Jevons paradox
Projections are useless. The past does not predict the future.
BLS is useless for the same reason, amplified.
The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so isn't as high-priority. The estimate on the cost is $20-50k of tokens.
$50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. As has been stated in a bunch of threads, much smaller models could also find this bug. The defense is "they didn't" and "once you know it's there, it's easier to find" but again, nobody has been paying BSD bug bounties. Put another way: far fewer people have been looking.
My point is that the economics of these models are still highly debatable. What they will do is allow you to use 1 engineer with AI tools instead of 2-4 engineers.
And we've arrived at the real goal here: to reduce head counts. Why? To suppress labor costs. To get people who didn't get laid off to do more free work.
In addition, AI capex is used as an excuse to cut costs ie reduce labor, for exactly the same reasons.
Lastly, the threat of this happening in the near to medium future is also used to scare labor and reduce costs.
Sufficiently largecompanies can't grow anymore. Their only path forward is to raise prices and redcue costs. For tech companies, labor is a significant cost. That's what's going on here.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/762774007353...
In a competitive market this doesn’t work exactly that way because you will then lose to your competitor who has 2-4 engineer + AI.
Maybe if demand is truly crazy the labs will take more margin
1. epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
2. http://hashrateindex.com/blog/nvidia-vera-rubin-nvl72-specs-...
Anytime anyone feels insecure that AI will genuinely do their job, I point them to creators like this [1]. Also, I find it so wild there are people, even here on HN, who don't admit that LLMs hallucinate, lie and forget.
I would have a hard time trusting any critical code produced by an LLM. This was a frequent complaint with OpenClaw (being Vibe coded) and the general advice was to not run it on any computer you're logged onto as you'll get hit by prompt injection attacks and the like.
Anyway, the models don't need to be reliable. They just need to be an excuse to fire people to suppress labor costs. That's the true use case.
God, I wish I was American sometimes...
Stop there. The costs of today state-of-the-art hype-ware will be lower tomorrow.
In a year, there will be fewer easy to find bug, and models like this will be cheaper.
Doing math based on hardware deployed today is a bit naive.
Assuming any of this is intentional about reducing devs is just dumb.
Then covid went away, life went back to "normal", tons of juniors everywhere who moved to IT because of WFH and the salary.
Then comes AI, within the IT field, I am seeing first hand companies firing by the thousands because of AI.
Only Blue collar was being affected in the past, but now is everybody, no matter of your degree, experience, you either already had a hard time or you will have.
If Google Quantum computing somehow finds a massive breakthrough, we are all fu :)
The problem with the tech layoffs is that it’s poisoning the well downstream. Smaller employers have repeatedly cited their layoffs as justification for abysmal, unlivable salaries, and demanding those of us looking for work suck it up and deal with it while they search for bottom-dollar unicorns.
AI isn’t replacing the IT crowd outside of the expected junior roles, and even that’s starting to rebound as executives realize Juniors were how they got “white glove service” for themselves - a Senior Engineer isn’t going to wipe their ass for them, job market or not, because said Engineer’s time is infinitely better spent on literally anything else.
One other thing I’ll note is that the layoffs also seem to be remnants of the Brogrammer hustle culture: tech folks were enjoying more time for themselves to grow or live life outside of work specifically thanks to a few good years of paying down technical debt with properly-staffed teams, but the grifters up top see anything less than a 9-9-6 as somehow stealing from the employer and slash accordingly. The remnants are expected to do more work for less pay, with AI tools somehow filling the gap (even though these same employers often don’t want to pay for proper tooling to maximize use of AI).
This is definitely an industry downturn as those who stand to gain maximize their immediate returns. From the perspective of the C-Suite and Boards, the safest (albeit unethical) move is to betray: if AI is a bust, they’ll have made their wealth and can fuck off; if AI eliminates jobs and work, they believe their wealth will protect them in the future dystopia of their own creation.
It’s in that context (“fuck you got mine”) that the broader narrative fits with the myriad of puzzle pieces out there (higher interest rates, stock pumps, circular financing, tariffs, aging population, AI, etc).
For the record, I tried, but the archive site only had the preview cached; I suspect it’s looking for a URL identifier to bypass the paywall that I lack access to, but I can’t confirm either way from a mobile device.
they dont care because nobody has a real gut feel affinity for computer programmers or the work, the sort of feeling that is required to animate somebody to action. it's never been a profession with any esteem, and the field never professionalized in the past 60 years, which is a shame, because we now see the outcome.
I mean look at what the coal mining industry is able to get and their numbers are quite small. There's more fast food workers at Wendy's than coal miners, but something tells me that Congress doesn't care about the baconator over rolling coal.
Start doing some advocacy work and this can easily change.
And that money sink is causing the layoffs. If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have a army of 100x devs.
Humans are still cheaper for the real costs. Augmented humans are on average a few percentage points better.
That fiber build out will last for decades, a Blackwell GPU, not so much.
No, because no one has any use for those monstrous GPUs outside of ML and some research projects. They can't even be dropped onto the consumer market because a SOHO is not equipped to house devices like that. The best case scenario is that the boards get dismantled and the VRAM gets salvaged for refurbishing. They've built these machines so specialized that they're essentially disposable.
Either way, the moat is about 7 inches wide.
But the secondary market that grew out of it was because once it is in the ground it has a long lifespan and low upkeep costs, this is not the same thing as ultra high power density data centers.
Cooling needs to be balanced with demand, they may not work for even cloud scale type loads without serious issues etc…
Not that it matters, my hometown has an announced DC and it is looking more and more like it is a shill, as do several of the others in the area.
When I zoom out, I see “token generation” as an infrastructural layer, with applications built upon it.
This seems maybe a bit reductionist.
AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization.
My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole.
But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.
When bubbles burst, investors change tack, and when investors pull back, companies turtle and do layoffs.
After Y2K, investment moved on to real estate. In 2008, that bubble burst. It moved on to social media next.
I would argue that bubble burst somewhat silently during COVID with the quiet deaths of Xitter and Facebook (from a standpoint of cultural relevance), and investment transitioned towards and into its current AI bubble.
Investors are always going to move on once the lustre of a field has waned, and I'd hazard that we'll see investment move somewhere other than software tech next (if I had to prognosticate, I'd say it's moving into robotics/ drones).
Some may blame AI, but the opposite is also true: The believers use the bust as "proof" that AI coding "works".
It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers.
This is "AGI".
Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?
No. The VCs and angel investors screaming “abundance” are the paid promoters.
The problem is their “utopia of abundance” is not for us. They know the opposite is the reality (layoffs, offshoring, wage suppression and AI backlash)
They built their own bunkers and moats for a reason. Because true “AGI” will bring an abundance of very angry people going after them.
That is not worth being paid for by any AI lab.
Bad news gets sold better. Even better hysteria. Why not write a hysterical article to milk some ads money on doom and gloom? Because we value your privacy, we use cookies and similar technologies. Some collect your data, like your IP address. Others collect anonymous data. Together with our 177 (holy fuck) trusted partners.
also if you want to test/force ai adoption you have to put pressure by firing some
now wars will put us into further stasis or decline via increased inflation pressure.