> In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
Yep, and that is also an explicit requirement for interviewers at every company I worked at.
I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.
When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.
Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).
Agree - this reminds me very much of the old joke of two economists increasing GDP by taking turns giving the same 200usd back and forth for having each other eat shit.
Useful / impressive for whom is the question.
Not for us!
We pay for Github enterprise, and because GH can't be bothered to separate service tiers for sloplords and actual paying customers we get garbage level performance. They could of course always implement usage limits, but the goal is not to earn money, or provide a good service, the goal is to maximize AI users. Would be very awkward at the next executive golf meetup if you couldn't point to increased AI adoption.
In short: This is why monopoly laws matter. Once a company becomes too large, normal business rationales cease to be the motivation for their actions, and GH can go along with the pied piper of AI psychotic C-suite officers like MS is doing instead.
> ... and this American people have gotten what they voted for.
Probably one of the biggest flaws of a Democratic system is that a voting majority can mandate a situation that harms literally everyone against the will of everyone else even when those harms are well documented and absolutely provable.
"The majority voted for it" isn't a great answer for the question "Why exactly are we letting the bus driver drive us all over this cliff edge to our fiery deaths?"
"Stop the bus! I want off!"
"Nope. The vote's done. You're stuck with the result."
"Well, what if I voted against driving over the cliff edge?"
Bear in mind the US electoral system is far from the best that can done.
Not all democracies are equal and the US system is barely "democratic" - it's spiralled in a two party not broadly representative Hotelling's Law swampland.
Interesting topic but why destroy your own credibility and reputation by shoveling llm-assisted slop to us here at hn?
The post should be flagged, and in general, i wish hn would adopt a no-tolerance policy to enhanced posting like this.
So what if the original text, if it existed in a human written form at all, had weird textual quirks and prose issues the author wished to hide. That texture's what makes humans interesting to engage with in the first place.
This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe.
This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.
Andrew decided to attack the person rather than ideas and positions. It's not a reflexive revulsion, it's an appropriately sized reaction to a blog post in poor taste.
> not having any morals
You don't agree with someone so you claim they have no morals. I don't have words for how stupid this is that anyone can so casually dehumanize someone over something so trivial.
That's what id Software did in December 2025. 165 of 185 of the studio's staff at the Dallas, TX office unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.
It's clearly llm-spew in its mannersims, making me wonder if there were any nuggets of wisdom in its core or if it in entirety is part of some llm-driven blog spam project?
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
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