It is actually possible to change the rules with sufficient notice period and to write enough details that people have a chance to understand exactly how the rules will change.
They're not doing that. This is a choice they are making.
A continuous series of overreach and calibrate the amount of rollback needed based on response makes sense if you're keen to push things to the limit society will bear without rioting
It was interesting how Microsoft basically directly got called out in the white house brief "One software company was approved for over 5,000 H-1B workers in FY 2025; around the same time, it announced a series of layoffs totaling more than 15,000 employees."
That would be surprising if developers were fungible. You can have a surplus of web developers (whom you lay off) while at the same time have a shortage of AI talent. Those web developers can't be hired in to the openings for AI talent.
None of us knew how to finetune a model 18 months ago, we learned. This idea that what you've done in the past is all you can do is such a dumb big tech idea that needs to die.
I would be surprised if programmers couldn't generally quickly pick up a new domain. I presume we're not talking 5,000 people doing heavy research (wouldn't that be O-1 anyway?), and I don't see how product development work becomes more complicated when you call it AI. e.g. you don't need a PhD to hook calls to a model into VS Code or to build the API and infrastructure around calling the model or data pipelines or all the other 90% of actually making it useful.
I wouldn't call developers fungible, but certainly good developers are adaptable.
I don't think Microsoft is lacking a supply of people capable of doing things, they're lacking a culture that lets you do things. The most annoying thing about Microsoft culture is that you have to pretend that Satya Nadella fixed it.
FTEs in the US get benefits and part of their taxes paid for them. Contractors are not (can be, typically are not).
Getting hired (getting an apartment, ...) is easier in the US as there are significantly less challenges at terminating those contracts by the 'provider' than in e.g. Germany, where it's really hard to fire or evict someone.
Account managers and sales engineers are the ones I’ve seen laid off. They seem to have kept the licensing specialists they need on calls because nobody understands the convoluted mess they’ve created. So, losing the people we were working with, on top of all the issues with the products themselves, it made going to OpenShift that much easier.
axios tries to describe it as "panicky advice," but as written the EO explicitly says H1B holders "except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section" will be restricted from entering the US.[1] This article isn't really actionable advice when the only attribution is to some un-named "White House official"
How so? With more isolationist policies? Coercion?
Sure, Trump could make Nvidia invest 5b into Intel. But that's only pacifying the shareholders among his cronies. It doesn't regenerate the company or bring back the burnt bridges and lost talent.
More like "sorry, this should not have happened. It still happened, but now we can't do anything. We take full responsibility, but nothings gonna change".
“ DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender," which is a tactic used by abusers to avoid accountability by denying their wrongdoing, attacking the victim, and claiming to be the real victim. This manipulation can make it difficult for others to discern the truth and often leads to the victim feeling blamed for the abuse they experienced”
Let's assume it really is only about code monkeys. Those asian code monkeys won't demand silly things like... unionization or decent living conditions. They are less likely to have problems with creating autonomous weapon systems that integrate facial recognition.
But it's not about those people. It's about experts in IT infrastructure, AI, researchers, etc. Those kind of people don't fall from trees and know that their expertise is well sought after. And if the US is not a safe or attractive choice, they go elsewhere. Simple as that.
Anybody know how it plays out for those who are already on a h1b and are changing jobs? Typically that does not count as a new entry in the lottery but technically is a lottery. Without mobility that is just more indentured servitude. Also its not clear why not just lock out the indian consultancies directly as who these culprits are is pretty clear? Or no? There were also plenty of opportunities to tie a single h1b to one person instead of to a job posting (resulting in 3+ parallel filings).
While not ideal, I don’t see the guest worker programs being a good thing unless the affected firms experience (and cannot escape or mitigate) a certain fiscal pain, especially if it involves revenue from global capability centers.
Makes sense, you don't want to affect already working high skill foreigners, because this will have immediate, massive disruptions on the tech industry.
The tariff "reversal" taught me that public opinion is easy to manipulate. Tariffs are not and were never reversed, this is extremely easy to verify, and yet I routinely encounter people who are certain that they got reversed.
No, they weren't! Imports from the vast majority of countries are currently subject to blanket tariffs within 5 percentage points of the April 2 proposal; some (Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, etc.) have significantly less while others (China, India, Brazil, Switzerland, etc.) have significantly more. Again, no shame for being misled, but it's been wild to see how many people are so extremely confident that this didn't happen.
Skilled immigrants being important to the country and the H1B visa program being abused by large employers can both be true at the same time. From my own personal experience, most H1B visa holders are competent but not uniquely skilled.
This would be stupid five or ten years ago. Right now however, we have enough tech people in the country for the current job market.
Not sure why you're down voted. But given the state of the tech job market it is unjustifiable to admit more H1Bs.
Now the flip side of it is - how will they control the outsourcing that typically comes with the H1B restriction? Every enterprise these days has an India development center (banks, telcos, pharma, big-tech, manufacturing, etc.). If they've had the money, they have established it. They can just scale up the hiring there. On second thoughts that's what they were all doing anyway and saying it was AI.
Agree, for ordinary CS jobs, there's plenty of workers available right now, thanks to AI. But for highly specialized jobs including AI research, you still need to be able to hire immigrant talent.
O-1 is not enough. For jobs requiring bachelors degree, there is currently plenty of US-born workers looking for jobs. For jobs requiring masters and PhD there is still a need for H-1B visas, and O-1 is too high a bar.
The new H1B fee effectively puts a cap on software engineer pay. I can hire an immigrant on H1B for $150k/year ($50k salary + $100k fee). So local hires better be cheaper than that.
Wouldn't it be more clear to say that for hiring approach, now the unexpected burden of tagging on a new 100k fee works as a negative coloring (as it I think intends (ostensibly)) to these candidates then? How was the 100k already priced in?
On the other hand, immigrants are the ones you can exploit the most and use against your own citizens. They are throwing away a resource they still need.
But I guess with enough coercive force, it just might work with your own populus too.
The American founders were almost all British settlers. You can’t compare settlers building a new society according to their own culture to immigrants coming to an existing society someone else built.
European settlers most of which from a tiny circle on the globe, and then we've had periods of immigration moratorium where our prosperity was dominated by domestic population. There's no law of the universe that says all immigrants are fungible.
An important point that emerged is also that the administration - at its discretion - can also waive the fee.
Just more corruption and leverage to push companies to do their bidding. Just rancid stuff.
It is actually possible to change the rules with sufficient notice period and to write enough details that people have a chance to understand exactly how the rules will change.
They're not doing that. This is a choice they are making.
A continuous series of overreach and calibrate the amount of rollback needed based on response makes sense if you're keen to push things to the limit society will bear without rioting
>This is a choice they are making.
yup
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Yes, the choice is to prioritise American software developers when a lot are out of work.
It seems eminently sensible to stop cheap labour from abroad in such a situation.
What is more likely? Strengthen local software building capabilities or do more offshoring?
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The trouble is that also gives a period to understand how to circumvent the law or capture the regulation.
It was interesting how Microsoft basically directly got called out in the white house brief "One software company was approved for over 5,000 H-1B workers in FY 2025; around the same time, it announced a series of layoffs totaling more than 15,000 employees."
That would be surprising if developers were fungible. You can have a surplus of web developers (whom you lay off) while at the same time have a shortage of AI talent. Those web developers can't be hired in to the openings for AI talent.
None of us knew how to finetune a model 18 months ago, we learned. This idea that what you've done in the past is all you can do is such a dumb big tech idea that needs to die.
but also the idea that anything you learned 5 years ago or earlier is no longer relevant.
I would be surprised if programmers couldn't generally quickly pick up a new domain. I presume we're not talking 5,000 people doing heavy research (wouldn't that be O-1 anyway?), and I don't see how product development work becomes more complicated when you call it AI. e.g. you don't need a PhD to hook calls to a model into VS Code or to build the API and infrastructure around calling the model or data pipelines or all the other 90% of actually making it useful.
I wouldn't call developers fungible, but certainly good developers are adaptable.
I don't think Microsoft is lacking a supply of people capable of doing things, they're lacking a culture that lets you do things. The most annoying thing about Microsoft culture is that you have to pretend that Satya Nadella fixed it.
I come from a country where you'd basically have to prove that the people you laid off could not be retrained to do the new roles.
If anything, what is the difference between an employee and a contractor if you can just terminate them once you're done with them?
FTEs in the US get benefits and part of their taxes paid for them. Contractors are not (can be, typically are not).
Getting hired (getting an apartment, ...) is easier in the US as there are significantly less challenges at terminating those contracts by the 'provider' than in e.g. Germany, where it's really hard to fire or evict someone.
That's not what's happening though.
Account managers and sales engineers are the ones I’ve seen laid off. They seem to have kept the licensing specialists they need on calls because nobody understands the convoluted mess they’ve created. So, losing the people we were working with, on top of all the issues with the products themselves, it made going to OpenShift that much easier.
I mean Microsoft laid off 5% of the developers and 30% of the product managers in my org, so they think that they don't need Windows development.
Retrain or pay them until they can replace their lost salary, contingents and contractors broadly included.
Most MS employees aren't even engineers!
Out those 15,000 employees how many were on VISA? They are acting like all 15k employees were US citizens and were replaced by h-1b employees.
Quite convenient to show the data such that it serves a narrative and hide the details.
So was intel in the following sentence.
axios tries to describe it as "panicky advice," but as written the EO explicitly says H1B holders "except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section" will be restricted from entering the US.[1] This article isn't really actionable advice when the only attribution is to some un-named "White House official"
[1] Section 1 here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
If you get deported into a prison camp by accident, the same officials will write a letter of formal apologies to your loved ones.
Well, more tech talent for India and China it seems.
“ Well, more tech talent for India and China it seems.”
Not if the US has any way to prevent that.
How so? With more isolationist policies? Coercion?
Sure, Trump could make Nvidia invest 5b into Intel. But that's only pacifying the shareholders among his cronies. It doesn't regenerate the company or bring back the burnt bridges and lost talent.
What, in crayon? Expect victim blaming, not apologies.
More like "sorry, this should not have happened. It still happened, but now we can't do anything. We take full responsibility, but nothings gonna change".
You had me up until “we take full responsibility”. This administration is much more about darvo response when they’re caught doing something wrong.
“ DARVO stands for "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender," which is a tactic used by abusers to avoid accountability by denying their wrongdoing, attacking the victim, and claiming to be the real victim. This manipulation can make it difficult for others to discern the truth and often leads to the victim feeling blamed for the abuse they experienced”
Yes, where "talent" = generic java developers writing CRUD apps for internal business functions.
Let's assume it really is only about code monkeys. Those asian code monkeys won't demand silly things like... unionization or decent living conditions. They are less likely to have problems with creating autonomous weapon systems that integrate facial recognition.
But it's not about those people. It's about experts in IT infrastructure, AI, researchers, etc. Those kind of people don't fall from trees and know that their expertise is well sought after. And if the US is not a safe or attractive choice, they go elsewhere. Simple as that.
Those types of people can get O-1 visas.
Anybody know how it plays out for those who are already on a h1b and are changing jobs? Typically that does not count as a new entry in the lottery but technically is a lottery. Without mobility that is just more indentured servitude. Also its not clear why not just lock out the indian consultancies directly as who these culprits are is pretty clear? Or no? There were also plenty of opportunities to tie a single h1b to one person instead of to a job posting (resulting in 3+ parallel filings).
Fix that, and give the limits more teeth.
While not ideal, I don’t see the guest worker programs being a good thing unless the affected firms experience (and cannot escape or mitigate) a certain fiscal pain, especially if it involves revenue from global capability centers.
Still doesn't clarify what happens to people adjusting their status from F1 to H1B inside the US. Is that a new visa ?
Yes, it would be a new H-1B visa.
Makes sense, you don't want to affect already working high skill foreigners, because this will have immediate, massive disruptions on the tech industry.
clarifying this point many hours into the 24 hour get home window does not make anything resembling sense.
Or you can proceed anyway and accept the damage as a bulwark against circumvention.
In the words of Charles Dickens: Portable property, my good sir. Portable property. (A Tale of Two Cities)
Still too much confusion!
The policy makers act like spoiled children. Always demanding instant gratificatio with little to no forthought for the future or the consequences.
Its not effective leadership.
its called populism, AKA fling it at a wall see if it sticks, then guess again.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/01/21/theres-a-term-for-trump...
That’s why I told y’all to not freak out… did the tariff reversal not reach us anything
The tariff "reversal" taught me that public opinion is easy to manipulate. Tariffs are not and were never reversed, this is extremely easy to verify, and yet I routinely encounter people who are certain that they got reversed.
The tariffs as they were originally formulated absolutely got reversed. No need to lie to make a snarky HN comment
No, they weren't! Imports from the vast majority of countries are currently subject to blanket tariffs within 5 percentage points of the April 2 proposal; some (Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, etc.) have significantly less while others (China, India, Brazil, Switzerland, etc.) have significantly more. Again, no shame for being misled, but it's been wild to see how many people are so extremely confident that this didn't happen.
Look at the original proposed tariffs vs now.
A better comment would have less snark and bring receipts ( links to reputable before and after data )
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
EDIT: Thank-you for for removing the uncalled for preamble, I look forward to seeing you make your case.
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If you were being paid to destroy the US this is what it would look like, immigrants built most of the US.
Skilled immigrants being important to the country and the H1B visa program being abused by large employers can both be true at the same time. From my own personal experience, most H1B visa holders are competent but not uniquely skilled.
This would be stupid five or ten years ago. Right now however, we have enough tech people in the country for the current job market.
Not sure why you're down voted. But given the state of the tech job market it is unjustifiable to admit more H1Bs.
Now the flip side of it is - how will they control the outsourcing that typically comes with the H1B restriction? Every enterprise these days has an India development center (banks, telcos, pharma, big-tech, manufacturing, etc.). If they've had the money, they have established it. They can just scale up the hiring there. On second thoughts that's what they were all doing anyway and saying it was AI.
They could have scaled up offshore hiring at any time. If it was actually cheaper for the same quality, they would have.
11% unemployment for CS majors. Absolute insanity to be admitting H1Bs for the tech sector right now.
Agree, for ordinary CS jobs, there's plenty of workers available right now, thanks to AI. But for highly specialized jobs including AI research, you still need to be able to hire immigrant talent.
There's the O-1 for that.
O-1 is not enough. For jobs requiring bachelors degree, there is currently plenty of US-born workers looking for jobs. For jobs requiring masters and PhD there is still a need for H-1B visas, and O-1 is too high a bar.
Fine, so there are some that fall below the O-1 bar. Nonetheless, those are a drop in the ocean compared to the regular $150k jobs being lost to H1Bs.
We don’t.
Immigration benefits capital and hurts labor, but big business has hypnotized the left into supporting it.
The new H1B fee effectively puts a cap on software engineer pay. I can hire an immigrant on H1B for $150k/year ($50k salary + $100k fee). So local hires better be cheaper than that.
Wouldn't it be more clear to say that for hiring approach, now the unexpected burden of tagging on a new 100k fee works as a negative coloring (as it I think intends (ostensibly)) to these candidates then? How was the 100k already priced in?
Why do you think the H1B will work for 50k/year? Where are you located?
On the other hand, immigrants are the ones you can exploit the most and use against your own citizens. They are throwing away a resource they still need.
But I guess with enough coercive force, it just might work with your own populus too.
No, destroying the US is what the rampant guest worker abuse is doing.
The American founders were almost all British settlers. You can’t compare settlers building a new society according to their own culture to immigrants coming to an existing society someone else built.
European settlers most of which from a tiny circle on the globe, and then we've had periods of immigration moratorium where our prosperity was dominated by domestic population. There's no law of the universe that says all immigrants are fungible.
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Were they immigrants or colonisers? It changes from week to week.
Well, good luck cap-exempt employers…