I would like to add...
1. From a paper posted at work as required by the Department of Labor.
Tata Consultancy is providing H1B Visa workers to be Database
Administrators for $66K/year. Tata is well known to take 1/3 off the
top, so that means H1B worker gets $44K/year. That's $22/hr. In Phoenix.
That is what we - as IT workers - are competing with. My children with
no college education make more than that.
2. Oh, it gets better with AI. I went to an all-day AI conference (it
was actually three days, but it made me physically ill, or maybe it was
something I ate). The presenters demonstrated how Generative AI can be
used in social media posts and on Instagram. The presenter admitted he
hadn't made a post in six months - he had AI generate a video of him
talking, lip-synched to his AI-generated voice, making hand gestures. He
also demonstrated live how to get ChatGPT to make LinkedIn posts that
sound like him. And then, he told us how he was able to avoid hiring an
executive assistant by collaborating with three AI Generalists for two
days. So eight labor-days of AI Engineer salary was expended to avoid
the recurring annual cost of a person's job.
3. Microsoft laid off 6000 last quarter and announced 3000 more, with AI
stepping into many of the roles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxl0w1w394o
4. Even in my own web-hosting, the host switched their live chat to a
chatbot. I had to migrate one of my sites from one type of account to
another about two months ago, and again on another site last week, and
needed guidance both times. In the first migration, a human on the chat
helped me. On the second, it was some Agentic AI. The chatbot was faster
than the human and gave me perfect answers, going so far as to weave in
parts of my question in its answer. It felt like it was straight out of
ChatGPT. And that's a problem - the AI gave me better customer service
than the human.
Regards,
George Toft
On 7/2/2025 12:28 AM, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
I think H1B visas for programmers and engineers should be FROZEN for 5 years.
AI is going to be transforming both the programming world and many engineering
roles. As a result, I believe there are going to be more software people dumped
on the market over the next 5 years than we had after Y2k.
Unfortunately, most of these folks are going to be US Citizens rather than H1B
visa holders, for reasons I alluded to earlier.
Congress should block all further H1B hires and demand companies spend that
money on retraining their existing US workers rather than dump them into a
rapidly shrinking job market and replacing them with foreigners.
Unfortunately, most of the 25 wealthiest billionaires in America also happen to
run companies that have huge staffs of software and hardware engineers. So
given the current political climate, what’s the likelihood that there will be
any significant change in current policies?
-David Schwartz
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