> The visa previously cost employers only a few thousand dollars. But the new $100,000 fee would flip the equation, making hiring talent in countries like India - where wages are lower and Big Tech now builds innovation hubs instead of back offices - more attractive, experts and executives told Reuters.
> "We probably have to reduce the number of H-1B visa workers we can hire," said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of popular artificial intelligence transcription start-up Otter. "Some companies may have to outsource some of their workforce. Hire maybe in India or other countries just to walk around this H-1B problem."
The roles sent to India are those that will soon be replaced by AI. For years US companies have treated India like an API to do menial tasks that we’re hard to automate. It made no sense for that do be done by American workers. Now probably 80% of that work can be replaced by AI in the next few years.
For a while the US outsourced a lot of call centers India, but that quickly became a stereotype for terrible cost cutting measures. The customer experience was horrible. Most of these have now been onshored or placed in locations with better performance for the American market, like Ireland, Canada, Costa Rica, or a lot of WFH folks in the US.
There is still a fairly large Indian American 1st and 1.5 gen diaspora with GCs and citizenship.
In most cases, we have those people manage relations with offshore teams in India.
So, just like how Chinese Americans became overrepresented in hardware and supply chain management roles in order to help manage a company's "China" story, the same thing is happening for "white collar" industries.
The first HN thread on the H1-B $100k fee pointed out that the $100k fee can be waived by the secretary (not sure which department). Most likely, H1-Bs won’t go away, they will just be bribe bait for the administration. Smaller companies who can’t lobby the admin or who aren’t in the good graces of the administration will have to do without H1-Bs, but all those tech titans who donated to the Trump Inauguration will magically get waivers for the fee.
It won’t be a matter of “outsource to India or hire locally”, it will be “what is the ROI of the bribe compared to having to hire locally when the labor market gets tighter?”
I can't imagine that any company executive thinks the solution to the new H1-B visa is going to be outsource more employees (if they are a US Based company). That would be the antithesis of this administration and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't stiffer penalties for companies that tried to do this.
Well, this is the end result. $100K per filing has now given every company a metric with which to benchmark whether they should open a GCC (an offshore office with P/L and Product Roadmap responsibilities) or continue to hire a mix of citizens and foreigners domestically.
If having to file for 10 H1B visas now costs the same as the amount of FDI needed to get $10-20k per head of tax subsidies and credits across CEE and India, the math to open an office abroad just became justified for every business.
Listen - I'm not saying that that isn't the logical response. I'm saying I don't see how an executive would go ahead with that plan thinking that there weren't going to be worse repercussions for their company from the government if they went that route.
The smallest companies that don't have visibility in the market maybe could try and do it (dangerous risk) but the larger companies that have a lot to lose from headline risk will be at significant risk.
Like the executive who only thinks in short term budget will go ahead and do this -- the executives who think maybe 2-4 years down the road will realize its a trap.
> but the larger companies that have a lot to lose from headline risk will be at significant risk
Google [0], Microsoft [1], and Amazon [2] have continued to make headline making investments abroad despite Trump being in office.
And these size of companies are large enough that they can eat the litigation cost, becuase it is significantly cheaper to completely offshore.
And in all honesty, the Trump glare isn't severe. You become part of the media zeitgeist for a couple of days, and then everyone moves on to some other controversy. Look at how this now overshadows the US-Korea snafu, which itself overshadowed the Russian oil snafu, which itself overshadowed ....
Those plans were already in place as a continuation and during a time when they thought tech would have a more coveted space in policy positioning. Watch what happens going forward -- they will re-plan investments (at least for the time being).
Yeah kinda hard to see companies being more aggressive than they already are about outsourcing. I know companies that fired their entire tech org from the CTO down and moved it to India.
When I was looking for work early this year I was told that most of the Google NYC roles were listed for internal transfers and that most of the actual hiring was in Warsaw (with 1000s of open roles, which I was told by Google recruiters at a conference in Europe)
If someone is transferring from SF to NYC they wouldn't have to advertise the position. I think the OP is referring to transferring people into the country on L1.
I was told that they were actually required to list them even if it’s someone transferring internally.
It was for a few specific ML research roles that I was interested in, of which there were very few in NYC and during the interview process I was told that they would go to internal candidates
> "We probably have to reduce the number of H-1B visa workers we can hire," said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of popular artificial intelligence transcription start-up Otter. "Some companies may have to outsource some of their workforce. Hire maybe in India or other countries just to walk around this H-1B problem."