Just lost my job and it’s so depressing seeing stuff like this every single day. 400+ applications and you don’t even get a call anymore. Nothing from recruiters. When you do get an offer, its 20% lower pay than ever before, while cost of living goes up. So you have to engage in borderline indentured servitude just to eat and pay rent.
I don’t feel like the H1B is as big of an issue as outsourcing is. The company that I was just laid off from also laid off all the H1Bs and outsourced pretty much every junior role to India. I’m hearing about this in a lot of other companies as well. While this is anecdotal, it seems to me that with the rise of remote work, it proved that out sourcing was very viable. India has a huge talent pool of highly skilled engineers, who can speak English and are willing to work for pennies on the dollar. I’m not sure where AI plays part in this. Perhaps, it allows those outsourced developers to provide higher quality code faster than ever before, but I have no way to prove that.
Either way, it’s pretty much a blood bath in tech right now, not sure what to do myself. Considering going back to my old career.
My company is absolutely taking advantage of the H1Bs. They just did a huge round of “move to head quarters and take a pay cut or leave with severance”. Anecdotal, but it seemed to mostly target H1Bs. Every single one I know said they basically have to or return home because they don’t know if the government will even function to processes new sponsorships if they found one.
The problem is even accounting for exchange rate, you get what you pay for.