New H-1b Visa Fee Will Not Apply to Existing Holders, Official Says

its called populism, AKA fling it at a wall see if it sticks, then guess again.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/01/21/theres-a-term-for-trump...

More like "sorry, this should not have happened. It still happened, but now we can't do anything. We take full responsibility, but nothings gonna change".

thots and prayas'

Let's assume it really is only about code monkeys. Those asian code monkeys won't demand silly things like... unionization or decent living conditions. They are less likely to have problems with creating autonomous weapon systems that integrate facial recognition.

But it's not about those people. It's about experts in IT infrastructure, AI, researchers, etc. Those kind of people don't fall from trees and know that their expertise is well sought after. And if the US is not a safe or attractive choice, they go elsewhere. Simple as that.

How so? With more isolationist policies? Coercion?

Sure, Trump could make Nvidia invest 5b into Intel. But that's only pacifying the shareholders among his cronies. It doesn't regenerate the company or bring back the burnt bridges and lost talent.

What is more likely? Strengthen local software building capabilities or do more offshoring?

The choice is also to deprive health shortage areas of doctors, and academic institutions of scholars, but keeping tech happy and screwing over health and research isn’t new either the administration.

I was always a fan of the Wheel of Law where every week a random law is selected and tweaked by chatGPT.

If you do not know the laws of tommorow you cannot game them and also makes long term planning way more exciting.

11% unemployment for CS majors. Absolute insanity to be admitting H1Bs for the tech sector right now.

Not sure why you're down voted. But given the state of the tech job market it is unjustifiable to admit more H1Bs.

Now the flip side of it is - how will they control the outsourcing that typically comes with the H1B restriction? Every enterprise these days has an India development center (banks, telcos, pharma, big-tech, manufacturing, etc.). If they've had the money, they have established it. They can just scale up the hiring there. On second thoughts that's what they were all doing anyway and saying it was AI.

This sort of rule is extremely common in EU legislation. GPDR, for example, only allows standing in court for governments. You don't get to sue for your GPDR rights, you can only beg the government if your rights got violated (not the police, not the courts, not parliament, the executive). Or "the minister" as they say here. In practice this means the ministry of justice has an office, which has nothing to do with the judicial system, and you can send a letter to them. Of course this means governments and favored companies are effectively not bound by the GPDR.

Simple. 'Pixelize' the windows of their HQs to show giant portraits of Trump at night by lighting them up accordingly.

That's not what's happening though.

I come from a country where you'd basically have to prove that the people you laid off could not be retrained to do the new roles.

If anything, what is the difference between an employee and a contractor if you can just terminate them once you're done with them?

I would be surprised if programmers couldn't generally quickly pick up a new domain. I presume we're not talking 5,000 people doing heavy research (wouldn't that be O-1 anyway?), and I don't see how product development work becomes more complicated when you call it AI. e.g. you don't need a PhD to hook calls to a model into VS Code or to build the API and infrastructure around calling the model or data pipelines or all the other 90% of actually making it useful.

I wouldn't call developers fungible, but certainly good developers are adaptable.

None of us knew how to finetune a model 18 months ago, we learned. This idea that what you've done in the past is all you can do is such a dumb big tech idea that needs to die.

Retrain or pay them until they can replace their lost salary, contingents and contractors broadly included.

Most MS employees aren't even engineers!

Also it could have been completely different and incompatible roles