alt Hacker News> H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs
I agree that the H1B train is a red herring but I explained in my comment how AI has enabled mediocre talent to become more effective. Effective enough where they are "good enough" for what most companies need.
One of the reasons why offshoring was difficult was that asynchronous work wasn't the normal, so what a lot of companies would do is give the uninteresting pieces to the offshored teams.
That's taken a 180 in 2026. Google, OpenAI, Meta are building core infrastructure and software out of India. They don't even have to pay H1B rates.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working, expedited post COVID but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not). All asynchronously.
These two factors have come together where the average tech worker out of SF is not longer very valuable - companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper, assisted by token spend.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced
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Hi, outsourced labourer here.
We also got laid off en masse. Well, I wasn't (for now), but several of my friends were months ago already and I'm not seeing them coming back anytime soon.
Laying off people is such an easy thing to do that no matter the region of the world, it's being done.
This seems like a complete opposite of what you'd expect. Why hire a team of mediocre overseas workers to prompt Claude (your characterization), then have to talk to them only at weird times of day, and have a 12 hour turnaround on anything? Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?
The talent pool in India has always trended towards mediocre. Highly skilled candidates do exist of course, but in a sea of diploma mill graduates they are extremely hard to find.
Companies have decided that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.
This is overall correct. Just a nit: openai/anthropic don't have much of an engg presence in India. But yes for all of big tech.
> The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced
What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?
I don't know how old you are, but if you were around in the early 2000's there was a BIG offshore fear. More and more they were hiring in India and the Philippines and other places. Initially it was the NOC / L1, maybe L2, and in certain areas.
Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.
Now, what has changed? Don't tell me Claude. As far as I can tell, these folks make a lot less, and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed. Culturally, you have to often tell them very explicitly what to do and it is not normal to think outside of the box. I doubt that has changed.
So why would we be more afraid than we were in the early 2000's?