From what I’m seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin’s war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders.
A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there’s such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).
Companies tend to hire visa’d workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that’s when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you’re saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you’re saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you’re hiring 5, you’re better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.
The bust is definitely pushing wages down, but a lot of tech companies have been able to decouple work from location.
Amazon doesn’t have to pay a wage competitive in Seattle any more for new talent. In the process of searching for the second HQ, Amazon got a lot of information from various cities on what they could offer Amazon, which let Amazon build out new offices where the cost of living is lower. If the job is full remote, you’re competing against applicants from around the world, not just the city you’re living in.
So you don’t need to go the path of visas, but it doesn’t mean the only alternative is well paying jobs in high cost of living cities.
they will just go to h1b visas, and hire lower quality people, to barely maintain things.
From what I’m seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin’s war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders.
A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there’s such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).
Companies tend to hire visa’d workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that’s when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you’re saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you’re saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you’re hiring 5, you’re better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.
The bust is definitely pushing wages down, but a lot of tech companies have been able to decouple work from location.
Amazon doesn’t have to pay a wage competitive in Seattle any more for new talent. In the process of searching for the second HQ, Amazon got a lot of information from various cities on what they could offer Amazon, which let Amazon build out new offices where the cost of living is lower. If the job is full remote, you’re competing against applicants from around the world, not just the city you’re living in.
So you don’t need to go the path of visas, but it doesn’t mean the only alternative is well paying jobs in high cost of living cities.