Comment by spprashant

HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.

That change FAR predates the most recent election.

There was never a mask. People have always cared more about their own country than their supposed political party.

If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".

There is no guarantee that any American will be hired to fill any job vacated by a former H-1(b) holder. The firm could contract or fail against foreign competitors.

How do you implement auto-filters?

> ... but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.

The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> ...

> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).

Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.

And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...

Though note:

> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.

And if this is important...

https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...

> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.

And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...

But that would defeat the whole point of offering the program(s) -- they are specifically designed to depress wages of American workers.

Clear path or no-path to citizenship I guess. The fact that H1B is a dual-intent visa muddies the water and allows employers to string along people for decades.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.

I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.

> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?

Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.

In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.

And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.

So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,

So the following are almost certainly all true:

  - Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
  - Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
  - Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off

Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?

> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down

Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.

The average American doesn’t understand growth, you can see it in who they vote for.

Or being priced out of housing because supply became artificially depressed