Yep. Google, at least, started this transition during Trump1.

The company has long had engineering sites in various other countries, but until Trump1, the primary focus was always on cities where Google thought the global talent would want to live. Low cost was clearly not the driving factor in the selection of London, Zurich, Munich, Tokyo and Sydney, to name a few of the ones I visited. US sites were similarly not located in low-rent areas. The workforce was definitely global, because Google wanted to hire the smartest people and while the US does have its share of brilliant minds, the US has only 4% of the world's population, so most teams -- even in the US -- ended up being minority American.

During COVID, Trump leveraged the health crisis to essentially halt H-1B approvals and renewals. This caused significant problems for Google. My own team lost a few people because they couldn't get their visas renewed and had to go back home. Some chose to move to other Google sites overseas where Google could get them a work visa, others simply went back to their home countries. One trans woman on my team was in a particularly tough spot because her home country (India) refused to renew her passport because it didn't recognize her new gender. She couldn't get her visa renewed, couldn't go home to India, and also couldn't move to any other country with an expired passport. Luckily, she had a lot of nVidia and Google stock she'd been saving up to buy a house, and by cashing that out had enough free cash to get an EB-5 "investor" visa. It's good to be rich, of course.

Anyway, Google saw what was going on and, anticipating future troubles of the sort, refocused its overseas office plans on building up teams and infrastructure, especially in India which provided so much of Google's engineering talent anyway, with the intention of shifting whole projects and workstreams there. The company had long required a significant percentage of all staffing growth to be in the US (and especially in the bay area), but that policy was scrapped and replaced by its opposite: A certain percentage of all new roles must be based overseas.

It's still the case that the center-of-mass of Google is in the bay area, but the company is actively working to change that, to build up overseas capacity, and not just groups of junior engineers under a manager whose role is to pass them detailed requirements for implementation, but instead full teams with highly-skilled and experienced senior engineers and managers able to take full ownership of major product areas and move them forward.

Trump's latest moves will just accelerate this transition. The result will eventually be a hollowing out of the company's US capacity, and therefore a reduction in the need to hire American engineers. Lucky for me, I'm leaving Google for a startup and anyway am not far from retirement. Between this stuff and AI being poised to replace junior engineering staff it's a good time to be getting out.

Also, I think it will soon be time to start shifting investments out of the US.

Geographical mobility used to be much easier. In the age of credit scores and limited housing, it is extremely difficult to find a landlord who will admit you without a job, and much harder to find a job that will hire you without already being local.

Well, credit scores as we know them have been around since the 60's...so, not really that new.

There's PLENTY of housing....just depends on what part of the US you are in.

I see houses for sale all the time where I live (New Orleans area)....it may be scarce in NYC or west coast urban areas....but that is not the whole US.

In other parts of the US, there are homes...GOOD jobs, and cost of living is much less.

And those are regular W2 jobs.....if you jump into 1099 contracting....you can work wherever and very much often....remote.

I've done both....and if you have any job experience, you can get jobs before you moved.

I've never moved before having a job in that area....

It never really went away.. They just stopped talking about it, and they finally stopped trying to put long form articles and news bulls etc on the desktop. We generally kept the widget, and status content type stuff, from weather and headlines to e-mail.

The problem with the desktop is a organizational space you visit briefly to switch or start tasks, and maybe move some files around. If it is actually displayed other than around the periphery for any amount of time it means the user isn't really 'using' the PC at all. They are idle. Now maybe they are an office worker sitting waiting for e-mail to arrive, but even then they'd rather be looking at an entertainment website of their choosing or just watching a video would a bunch of junk overlaid until something chimes or whatever.

The 'Desktop' is really a bad spot for content. Either people don't see it, or they'd rather consume it in some other virtual space.

I know exactly what it means thank you very much.

Literally everyone who ever used the term before this thread, was thinking about the 'production' of information when they said information economy. We were going to pay all these knowledge workers to sit and analyze data to produce information on demand. That is what they meant by information economy! Except nobody is going to need that in the very near future there will be relatively few questions big-data and machine learning can't answer, at least not to practical satisfaction. Nobody will care about your materials patents when they can just say "find me a polymer that has the characteristics x,y,z that I can synthesize for feed stocks a,b,c..." and get an answer in hours.

What I am talking here is more trade secrets that enable industrial production. Those secrets are only valuable as long as you use the to effectively control the actual production and restrict the entry of others into the market place. There is a non-zero cost associated with keeping such secrets, and it only grows more expensive the more people you have to let in because you don't want to do the manufacturing and vertical integration yourself.

In the end it gets out, and when it gets out the parties with the most industrial capacity win the marketplace. China has understood this and planned accordingly. We on the other-hand have ignored the constantly accelerating rate at which information becomes defuse. It will be worth less and less and need to be better and better to be of any value.

You can even see this in ad tech, it used to be that with a little demographic understanding you could make a mint. Now that we putting ads on peoples refrigerators the ad saturation is near its max, you have target ads better and better, 30 somethings with a child under 18 at home isn't good enough anymore to make money, now you need to know what they had for dinner last night and what color their carpet is to be worth anything to clients.

 

Only brain washed Marxist would say that. FUCK YOU

Not sure about all that but to me this might be the sell signal for NVIDA.

Making direct investments in your biggest customers when your product has the higher entry barriers, is always a little suspect in my book. If you believe that much in what they are doing why not build your own business unit?

Obviously there are very real and very good reasons, but as an outsider I can't distinguish those motivations from, I am buying into them so I can protect market share, make the core volume continue to look great and hope nobody questions the anticipated but returns I don't really believe the clients can generate.

There's also the subject-verb disagreement bubble.

We also know information obeys the laws of entropy. fundamentally it wants to be defuse.

We do not live in an economy based on information. We live in an economy based on secrecy and superior knowledge and technical capabilities. It worked great back in the 60s when the Chinese did not have the technology to do a lot of precision manufacturing at scale.

We got cherry pick the high value, low input cost commercial activities - a science and tech dividend. They have caught up now, partly because we believed our own BS about 'information economy' without understanding the value came for 'secrecy and scarcity' or refusing to admit it anyway.

Now the pandemic should have shown you once and for the 'post-informaiton-age' economy is absolutely about industrial production. It no matter how clever a piece of software is, it not going to transport you from point-a to point-b, it won't keep you warm at night. Now that electric motor built on the assembly line might pull your car down the road or be the blower in your hvac assembly.

Now remembering all the supply chain challenges and looking at what sectors are really driving inflation, it is clearly not 'information' that is the key price component..

Nice hand wave there. That is called public policy, in a free society. Like you say it is about what the proportions will be. You don't know the policy won't achieve its goals, of employing more Americans in net, you are just assuming that part because you don't like the current leadership and not for any informed reason.

The real questions if this is more to little to late, and it might be. Even so trying something is better than doing more nothing. At the end of the day what difference does it make if you get laid off today so they can hire a cheaper h1b to replace you vs you getting laid off so they can outsource your entire project. - None. Arguably the later might buy you a little more time.

Of course the administration is looking at taxing some foreign employment as labor imports as well. So it is likely that this is one of a multiple prong approach to a broader protectionist strategy for American knowledge workers. I just hope the current bunch can stay in office long enough to implement it all.

Not so easy once your kids have friends and school in Seattle.

As a child, I had to move with my parents a number of times as Dad progressed through his career....

Hell,, military brats do it all the time still....but it wasn't that long ago this was pretty common....grow up, leave the nest....it's ok and natural....

I guess you must be single or young....Reasons not to leave your area: owning a house, family, friends, not wanting to pull kids from school during critical times (or mid year), established connections, and a lot more tech jobs in Seattle than 99% of the rest of america, outside silicon valley? "Sell your house" and then you pick up a house that is also overpriced but pay much higher property taxes. Income tax is *zero* in Washington...Also, this is actually Redmond, not Seattle proper.

When did people get to be such pussies about moving?

Hell, when I grew up, this was a common thing....you moved to where the best job or new opportunity was.

Fun? No.

PITA? Yes

But families did it as a matter of how life is/was....

I remember as a kid moving a number of times

...as my Dad career progressed.

I myself have moved....

Do people today believe that as grown adults they STILL have to live near Mommy and Daddy?

Friends? Well hell, there's a TON of ways to stay in touch that weren't there when I was young....you only had phone calls and snail mail growing up and if they were real friends....you stayed in touch.

Today it's a piece of cake to keep in touch.

When I grew up, most people I knew hit the road at 18yrs or so and often it was to a different state for college and jobs....no one had to stay in same town as Mommy....but then again, we never too "Mommy" out on job interviews like they apparently do today...

So....I know this sounds strange this day in age..BUT you could do what they did in the "olden days" of say 20+ years ago and...

...MOVE TO WHERE THE JOBS ARE....

Simple really.....believe it or not, people used to do this type thing without a 2nd thought....

Take away the satellites, and you effectively take away the drones. Don't kid yourself. The destruction of comms satellites will cripple nations, as we've largely gotten rid of backup terrestrial navigation aids like LORAN in the West, while both Russian and China kept legacy nav and com systems as backups, and are even expanding them. The first day of the war, satellites will be the very first thing to go, because you go after your enemies communications first.

I guess if this is true....

Then I regularly shorten my neighbors lives (and mine) whenever I fire up my log burning offset smoker for BBQ.

I don't generally have any complaints....quite the opposite reaction in general (I share and offer to throw things on for them too, since it is large and I often have extra room).

I think what is possibly actually interesting about the latest wave of machine learning is we might actually be approaching a point where we don't need to create 'new software' for many tasks even new tasks.

I don't think we can vibe code or prompt engineer our way to things that require high precision and absolute correctness, I don't think you'll want your bank keeping a ledger in their vibe-coded database engine but... there are lots of computing tasks where if you could get the error rate down to that of a 'persons with a pencil in 1970' it would be 'good enough' same thing for lots of process stuff like the QC guy on the boxed cracker line, or even the knowledgeable salesman.

I think there could be a giant segment of the custom software market that just gets replaced a sorta single 'god-program' that is a ML engine backed by some very large models and enough compute resources to just make it work.