Comment Re:Return to office (Score 1) 105
Fairly obviously, this almost certainly won't result in many thousands of H1-Bs each paying $100k to the US government each year; it'll result in many thousands of jobs that would have been paying US taxes on their wages, and then paying for accommodation, a car, for leisure, and whatever else into the US economy paying their taxes and spending their wages in wherever the new (or expanded overseas) office is instead.
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.
