Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

These jobs are being offshored to India. You can tell by how they're massively hiring there.

Google launches largest office in India https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/news-and-trends/google-la...

Microsoft India head says no layoffs in India https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...

Did you miss this: "Google in India has a workforce of over 10,000 spread across major cities in India." That's out of a total workforce of about 200,000.

Worked with Indians. Extremely aggressive, yet capable enough and organized. Not surprised. With ChatGPT making hiring in the US far more expensive yet inadequate enough to make hiring Indians a necessity. Just know your security both online and offline if you have to work with them in your ranks. They won't stop with just eating your lunch.

Aggressive in what way?

There is little substance to this comment other than stereotypes about India. I don't like this kind of generalization -- there are over a billion Indians, let's not lump them all together in a caricature

This must be the "America first!" policy we keep hearing about. It is also strange that no one mentions losing the CS race to India (compare with the fake "losing the AI race to China" argument).

So, the Indian CEOs of Google and Microsoft perform their duty and turn the companies into boring has-been companies like IBM.

Onshored, too.

My mid-sized US city (Chattanooga) has an MSA of <500k ppl, yet employs approximately 1,762 H1-B visaholders (primarily as software engineers and data analysts, median salary $85k) [0]. Apparently nobody local is able/willing to perform these jobs?!

And yet the complaint/advice I hear most from local techies is to "WFH at a national company if you want to actually make any money, here. Or move elsewhere." Or some other iteration of "there aren't enough IT jobs here."

I'm a blue collar tradesman, so WFH isn't really practical; but I'd definitely have to move elsewhere if I were in tech and didn't want to WFH.

[0] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=&city=chattanooga&yea...

I haven't seen the aggressiveness, but I have seen Indian CTOs move into functioning companies without having any provable accomplishments or ideas. So I assume their real role is to replace the native hires with overseas contractors.

This, there's also another kind of "shoring" where people are imported and given salaries at the bare minimum to qualify for H1B. As per my other post, the net amount is staggering and no where near the supposed 65k cap. My own right estimates put it at ~600k annually.

I think it was a fair characterization, if only because employers know that H1-B visaholders are desperate to not be deported (i.e. must maintain employment/sponsorship).

Wages are kept suppressed, keeping people (citizens and not) desperate.

The people that have (e.g.) immigrated into America, but not naturalized yet, are in extremely perilous positions, beholden to a corporate entity which would rather employ them (for wayyyyy less salary) than cater to free-er citizens.

¢¢

> These jobs are being offshored to India.

That was inevitable the moment remote work caught on. Software engineers in rich countries were stupidly short-sighted to cheer on the remote work. If your work can be done from anywhere in the US, it can be done from anywhere in the world.

If you think timezones or knowledge of English will save you, Canada has much lower wages for SWEs and central/south America has enough SWEs with good English skills. They are also paid one third or one fourth of what SFBA jobs used to pay. No wonder all the new headcount I have seen since 2022 is abroad.

Remote work, high interest rates and (excuse of) AI coding agents has been the perfect storm which has screwed junior SWEs in the US.

But specifically to India? There are many other countries with low income and robust education for CS and reasonable English skill. Eastern Europe for example.

There’s a very simple fix for this. Don’t make H1B a lottery system. Grant them in order of highest-paying roles.

We get access to truly exceptional people for whom companies are willing to pay exceptional wages, and we eliminate the exploitation of H1B visa workers.

In the database I linked above, I have seen convenience store employees with low-salaried H1-B visas — how is it not possible to find such a citizen?!

Definitely like the idea of removing the lottery system — great suggestion.

Maybe all the strong Eastern European SWEs head to Western Europe for the higher pay?

Let's also not forget, India is a massive and growing market in its own right. Literally the 4th-largest economy in the world, soon to be 3rd. It's like China at the turn of the century.

India has a (very) low base effect so it's absolute GDP growth is high. But it is growing much slower than China at the same point. Currently India is growing at about 6-7%, at the same GDP per capita China was growing at ~12%. If growth doesn't slow down, it'll take ~30 years to reach where China is now. There are lots of structural problems about the economy, and growth will likely be uneven and slower in the future.

But it is not a great place for these firms because disposable income is so low. For example, the US generates the most revenue per user for Google because it has a really high income. India is unlikely to make any significant part of tech firms revenue for a long time.

> it'll take ~30 years to reach where China is now

And it's been 25 years since the turn of the century. So I was approximately correct.

> There are lots of structural problems about the economy, and growth will likely be uneven and slower in the future.

It could be better than expected, or it could be worse. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

> But it is not a great place for these firms because disposable income is so low

That matters for advertising revenue. A $30m contract for cloud services is still a $30m contract. And in any case, software is famously high-margin. Low revenue per user often isn't a problem if you have a lot of users. They're still profitable, just not wildly profitable.

> the US generates the most revenue per user for Google because it has a really high income

It's also saturated. The market demands growth.

Even though India will be relatively poor per-capita, in absolute terms it will be a bigger economy than Japan or Germany in the next 5 years (it's already bigger than one of them). Would any serious multinational company ignore the Japanese or German markets or deem them irrelevant to business?

And spread across a nation of ~1,450,000,000 people.

Yes, and Google has laid off ~12000+ (including some churn). Googles current head count is only ~7k below peak. The new office building alone will hold 5k, not to mention other hiring in other indian offices.