Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs (opens in new tab)

The author is a tech writer from india.

It wouldn't make any sense for them to call it offshoring.

In some ways they are.

For a bit of time I worked offshore for a company in the US. That was pure cost cutting, I was making probably around 5x-10x less than someone with similar skills in the US.

After a while I landed a job that required me to migrate to a different country. I actually make more here than the average salary for a local engineer.

I don't know many machinists that are hired from halfway across the globe, relocation costs included, to make more than the average machinist in the destination country.

Funny, is not really the term I think of. The common denominator of it has always been manipulative and abusive lying. The parasitic ruling class of psychopaths has always used rather basic and typical abusive patterns like dividing, disparate qualifications, constantly moving targets, refusing success, leading on with promises, evading responsibility and especially consequences, often with yet more abuse and even enlisting others to expand and validate the abuse.

Just alone "going where the talent is" itself is just plain out abusive and narcissistic behavior typical of the worst people, it's clearly not the parasitic ruling class or their parasitic abusiveness ... it's you, that you are not "talented", you are not "worthy" now that they have sucked and drained all they can get from you for decades and generations with all the other euphemistic language like "offshoring" instead of "wanting to profit at your expense but externalize the costs onto you too".

So you did this to yourself ... don't you know... because you are simply not talented enough and now you made the parasites have to go seek the talent elsewhere ... see what you did to the parasites who only just want to do right by you?

Humanity really needs to gain a far greater understanding of what narcissism is, how to identify it, how to resist and stand against it, how to counter it, and even how to utterly destroy and eradicate it and anyone who does it from society.

Many people simply don't even really understand what it is let alone how pernicious and subtle it is in its subversion; but it is utterly destructive, subversive, and parasitic for all of humanity. If we self-eradicate human life on this planet it will 100% be due to our inability to control narcissists like the people who say things like "going where the talent is". Just alone saying that kind of thing is utterly abusive and should be considered treason, because it is... betrayal.

Homie you’ve been around here long enough to know that that is exactly the case

Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital

It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction

People wonder why software developers are anti-union it’s because they are fundamentally capitalist at heart

Ehh, it's called offshoring for programmers too. Maybe "outsourcing" in some places. The Indian IT giants themselves call it the onsite / offshore model, with a few "onsite" people -- liasons typically on H1B embedded in the clients' offices -- coordinating the much larger "offshore" teams.

This was the old Google, new Google lays off teams and moves them to India. New grad hiring is all but paused, hiring just enough to Seniors to backfill attrition and trying to slot them in at n-1 or n-2 levels.

That may have been how Google did it back in the day, but in the modern McKinsey approved enterprise noticing that you can pay someone in the UK, or Croatia, or India a fraction of what you have to pay an American is impossible to miss.

>> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.

> I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.

You'll notice I was responding to something I quoted. They claim they're taking action X because of Y, when they're actually taking action X because of Z. Changing Y will do nothing about X. Hence the tone.

Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."

I'm not the person you replied to but I don't see how your comment relates to his, I mean, did you reply to the wrong comment? Do you understand the difference between "talent" and "cheap labor"?

> Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.

You provided zero evidence for any of these sins in the comment you replied to. I'm kind of shocked how economists get shocked out of thin air, it seems they make everything out of thin but highly compressed air.

> There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc.

There's a reason why people avoid these - in their present form, they provide zero practical value and even worse, teaching them amounts mainly to shamanistic incantations designed to confuse and hide the truth -e.g. BS about "talent" when the issue is "cheap labor".

That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ...

Sucks for people born in Israel btw.

yeah Israel tends to be strong in cyber security.

However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup

you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market

> less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.

I’m going to wager at least one reason for this is Israel is big in industries that demand that sort of knowledge where in the US, most money was made by CRUD monkeys putting together high level line of business applications.

At this point it no longer matters. Thanks to Trump, they have no choice. We can discuss nefarious motives all we want, and they may even exist, but they don't really factor in at this point.

> Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't [owe] anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.

That's not true. A US company should be loyal to the US: the fact that they are not is political dysfunction.

China, for all its faults, gets that, and it makes sure its companies are loyal to China. They're also in the process of burying the US economically and technologically. The US is falling behind in industry after industry, and its not creating new, sustainable technological edges at a sufficient rate. That's partially because the shareholder-mercenary American companies repeatedly make deals with the much more strategic China, that weaken themselves and America in the medium to long term.

> What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.

It was always unacceptable. It's just that too-many idiot software engineers confused themselves for capitalist barons, because they had a 401k and a higher-than-average salary.

I don't think anyone believes they're entitled to them.

However, in my opinion, if these companies want to continue to enjoy preferable tax treatment and the deregulated environment the US provides them, then they should be expected to hire people in the US to drive the US economy.

If they're not going to do that, then we (meaning the Government both state and federal) should stop incentivizing them. Why would we give government contracts to a company that's offshoring jobs? Why would we give them tax breaks? Why would we leave their markets largely unregulated?

The US Government should incentivize and support companies that are providing value residents of the US. As these companies move to offshoring (and other similar policies), they become economically extractive and the government should no longer support and enable such behavior.

I think the logic goes something like...in a democracy, government policies should reflect the will of the people. The majority of the people are against exporting jobs overseas when the economy at home is not doing well, especially when the people that control the hiring are becoming obscenely wealthy at the cost of impoverishing the workers.

And why indeed do scabs not deserve a right to work as well?

We absolutely fucked up there. There definitely needs to be protections for shareholders to reduce the chance of exploitation and fraud, but part of the “free market” as it were is for shareholders to fuck off to other companies if they don’t like how one is run.

The “shareholder value” mandate is one of the greatest perversions of the “free market” out there, miles above any discourse about minimum wages or worker protection laws. Undo that decision along with the Reagan-era ruling permitting share buybacks, and you’d substantially weaken the Boardroom and C-Suite while turning off the two single biggest incentives to the current system of exploitation.

But not particularly good for the startup ecosystem; it could make it even less attractive to not take a corporate job

33K workers added in 2025 is a drop in the bucket for India. India graduates way too many engineers vs not as many jobs created.

I like paying as little as possible for everything I buy as well and so does everyone else reading this. So what's the problem?

Every economic decisions has that "at the price I want" caveat at the end of it?

There's no housing shortage, just a shortage of house at the right place and price. Different places have the right price, the right places don't have the right prices.

There's no job shortage, just a shortage of jobs that pay what I want and am qualified for.

Shortages happen in controlled economies, capitalism just adjusts prices.

> Decades ago companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s.

Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring.

It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in the US is so superior to make up for it.

As folks optimize for getting these high paying jobs it is increasingly difficult to find someone who has legitimate problem solving skills vs someone who has invested a lot of effort into looking hireable.

> There is talent in the US, all it takes is training

Training is expensive and can fail.

That's why experience has value.

It’s less this but more that talent diversity is present elsewhere. You need constant supply of talent and a good ecosystem that sustains it.

Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.

Certainly for the people working there, right?

Do you believe in workers' rights?