Thread regarding Dell Inc. layoffs

ya a 7:00 am every day

You all are worried about a bunch of visa people, while 90% of my team is sitting in Bangalore.. and every person leaving here in the US, the req gets opened in India. Sadly, I go to office to talk to them in teams.

@kq yes, let the people be heard.

@kd Nope. The Feds will be taking 100 large for every new H1B. Numbers will plummet. Big Tech will sue, and it'll take a year or more for the case to wind through courts. By the time it reaches the court, they'll come up with a new plan to eliminate H1Bs, and have to start all over again.

Even now politics are changing. Democrats are finally figuring out they need to protect labor interests in this country. Policies will shift, and Big Tech telling everyone all those lies over all those years will fall on deaf ears as politicians all finally realize they're losing votes to people who think (often rightfully so) that both parties have sold out their jobs to business.

@kd yes because the H1-Bs are so talented. Lol. Anyone that has ever worked with an H1-B knows that this is a fallacy.

@All Americans we are going to eat your breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert leaving u leftovers 🤣🤣😁

@gb Nope. We need to replace 65K per year. It's very doable.

@gb That is a bunch of hogwash. Instead of AI generated projections for the next 15 years, talk about reality. What is the net job created by the top 10 tech companies this year? Probably a minus number.

@g1

You’re living in a feel-good fantasy where “just pay Americans more and poof, 700,000 world-class software engineers, ML researchers, and systems architects magically appear.” That’s not economic reality—that’s nationalist copium.
Let’s do the math you keep dodging, but this time without the gentle padding:

• The U.S. needs to replace ~600,000–700,000 working H-1Bs (mostly in tech) while simultaneously filling ~350,000 net-new tech jobs and ~200,000 annual replacements from churn/retirement by 2033.
Total shortfall if we slam the borders shut tomorrow: roughly 1.2–1.5 million qualified bodies over the next decade.

• Domestic CS/engineering bachelor’s grads: ~110,000 per year max.
After leakage to finance, consulting, grad school, and the ones who just burn out and become yoga instructors: maybe 60,000 actually enter software roles.
That’s 600,000 over ten years—less than half of what we need just to tread water, never mind grow.

• You think “offer more money” fixes this? We already did. Base pay for new-grad software engineers at the big tech firms is $150k–$250k, total comp $200k–$400k+. Senior ICs and staff engineers are clearing $500k–$1M+. That’s more, inflation-adjusted, than any generation of engineers has ever been offered in human history.
And guess what? The enrollment needle barely twitched. Americans looked at the 80-hour weeks, constant LeetCode interviews, and on-call rot—and a huge chunk said “nah, I’ll take finance or law or even plumbing instead.”

• The specialized talent you’re so confident we can “grow at home” doesn’t work like that. The number of people on Earth who can meaningfully push the frontier in large-scale distributed systems, compiler design, or cutting-edge ML is measured in the low thousands. A non-trivial percentage of them were born in Hyderabad or Shenzhen, not Ohio. You don’t “incentivize” a mid-career American accountant to become one of those people. It’s a 10–15 year process starting from age 12, and we didn’t run that program.

• Clothing manufacturing never came back because wages in Bangladesh are $0.50 an hour and the work is brain-dead simple. You actually think FAANG is going to keep $800 billion in market cap while paying Bangalore-level wages? No—they’ll just move the whole damn team to Bangalore (or Toronto, or Warsaw, or remote-friendly EU). We’ve seen this movie before: when H-1B caps were tight in the early 2000s, Microsoft opened a giant campus in Vancouver. They’ll do it again in a heartbeat.

Bottom line: if you actually ki-l the H-1B program without a 20-year heads-up, you don’t “bring the jobs home.” You watch American tech slowly bleed global market share while the next generation of unicorns gets founded in Toronto, London, Singapore, and Shenzhen by the exact same “foreigners” you just deported. The jobs don’t come back—they evaporate or flee.

That’s not “economic reality” in your favor. That’s arithmetic telling you the richest country in the world still can’t conjure elite STEM talent out of thin air on a five-year timeline. We’re already at the absolute limit of what financial incentives alone can produce, and it’s nowhere near enough.

Bank on that.

we will eat your lunch and you will say thank you.

@fg It's just economic reality that the US can produce people capable of replacing H1Bs. I don't know why you keep trying argue with "math" that we can't do this. Of COURSE the richest country in the world can do this! Duh. If you give an economic incentive, we can do it. The H1Bs that keep up-voting your posts live in a fantasy world where they think somehow the US can't compete with India in producing tech-workers.

There's plenty of jobs that won't come back to the US. Clothing manufacturing for instance. Too low pay, and too much competition from the rest of the world for cheap clothes. Even China is generally too expensive for clothing manufacturing, so lots of clothes are made in Bangladesh or Vietnam.

IT jobs just aren't among them. High paying, we have the infra-structure to ramp up creating these jobs, and there' incentive to do so.

It'll happen, you can bank on it.

H1-B is just legalized indentured servitude. The only reason it exists is for companies to be able to hire cheap foreign labor instead of expensive US labor.

@eh The “340M people → we can easily replace 65k H-1Bs” argument ignores the math:

• U.S. produces ~100–110k domestic CS/EE grads per year max (after removing the 35–40% who are foreign students).
• Tech alone has 350–400k openings annually and ~1.5M unfilled jobs at any moment.
• Even if every domestic grad went straight into tech (they don’t), we’re still 250–300k short every year.

Bootcamps (~25–30k grads) and career-switcher stories are great but tiny and rarely fill the senior/specialized roles H-1Bs target.

Companies already try to hire Americans first—they enter 3–5× more H-1B applications than the cap because the qualified domestic pool simply isn’t there at scale, right now, in the locations they need.

H-1B workers aren’t magic; there just aren’t enough American equivalents today. Until the pipeline triples, ending H-1B means slower growth or offshoring the jobs entirely.

@eh When you have 340 million people, you don't need all 340 million people to be quality replacements for the h1bs.

It's just a ridiculous argument that we can't produce 65K people a year to replace H1Bs. We can, and we will. It's no more complicated than that. I've seen H1B visa holders. They're not made of magic, they're just regular people. I've seen a guy that was a manager, re-trained in his 40s to become a software developer. Happens all the time.

This is a great country, and there's zero reason why we need to import talent.

@ew Your anecdote doesn’t outweigh national labor-market data. Seeing some unemployed STEM grads on a few campuses doesn’t prove there’s no skills shortage especially when new grads compete for entry-level roles while H-1Bs typically fill specialized, mid- to senior-level positions where domestic supply is thin.

Multiple independent studies all show persistent gaps in areas like cloud engineering, chip design, AI/ML, and cybersecurity. That’s not “bureaucratic spin” it’s consistent evidence across academia, industry, and labor economists.

So a handful of campus visits isn’t a counterargument. It’s just a small, biased sample being used to dismiss what the larger, verified data clearly shows: the shortage is real, and your anecdote doesn’t disprove it.

@eh What a bullsh-t. My personal experience as a recruiter for Dell indicates a discrepancy with the official narrative. In recent campus visits throughout the Northeastern US, I encountered a large number of unemployed STEM graduates. These on-the-ground observations suggest that the data cited from bureaucratic and potentially lobbyist-influenced sources does not accurately reflect the current job market. The volume of available domestic talent suggests the stated need for H1-B immigration is vastly overstated.

@d7

1. Quantity ≠ Quality or Speed
   • U.S. population: 340M → only ~80K CS bachelor’s + ~60K master’s/PhDs in STEM annually (NSF 2024).
   • Big Tech + startups need 1.5–2M new STEM hires over the next decade just to keep pace (BLS + CompTIA 2025).
   • Even if every single U.S. STEM grad went straight into industry (they don’t—many go to finance, academia, government, or leave the field), we’d still be short hundreds of thousands of engineers every year.
→ “Easily replace” is mathematically impossible without crashing salaries to levels that would drive even more natives out of the field.
2. “Best schools in the world” rely on foreign talent
   • 50–80% of graduate students in top-20 CS/EE programs are international (e.g., Stanford 2024: 71% intl in CS master’s/PhD).
   • They pay full tuition (~$60K–$80K/year), subsidizing research and keeping programs large enough to train Americans too.
   • Kick them out → programs shrink → fewer American grads, not more.
3. “Cheap & beholden” myth is outdated
   • Median H1B salary in Big Tech 2024–2025: $170K–$220K+ (Levels.fyi, USCIS wage data). That’s higher than most U.S. new grads.
   • Prevailing wage rules require companies pay H1Bs at or above market rate for the role and location.
   • Total compensation (including stock) for mid/senior H1B engineers routinely exceeds $400K–$800K—hardly “cheap labor.”
4. The “beholden” part actually hurts companies, not workers
   • H1B ties the worker to the sponsoring employer for years → companies lose leverage the moment the employee gets a green card (which many do after 3–7 years).
   • Once free, they often leave for higher-paying startups or found their own companies (55% of $1B+ unicorns have immigrant founders—NVCA 2024).
5. Historical proof: when the H1B cap was cut before, innovation slowed
   • 2004 cap drop from 195K → 65K → Indian/Chinese talent went to Canada, UK, or stayed home → rise of Bangalore/Shanghai as tech hubs.
   • Today China graduates 4.7M STEM students/year vs. U.S. ~650K. If we send their best home after a U.S. PhD, we’re deliberately arming competitors.
   Bottom line: You can’t “easily replace” 100K+ highly specialized workers per year from a domestic pool that’s 5–10× too small—unless you think Tesla, OpenAI, and biotech should just pause progress for a decade while we wait for more American 12-year-olds to finish their PhDs. And the “cheap labor” claim doesn’t survive a 30-second glance at actual 2025 salary data.
   The plug isn’t getting pulled on H1Bs—it’s getting pulled on the fantasy that America can stay #1 in tech while pretending global talent doesn’t exist.

not to mention the H1b all give favorable Tell Dell scores which helps company visibility. They're cheap and are su-k ups, that's why they're here. Oh, and most H1b attend grad school in the US...same grad schools that US folks attend. How are they smarter?

@d7 Pure nonsense.

You can't refute we have 340 million people in this country and the best schools in the world. We can easily replace every single H1B in the country.

What's irrefutable is that Big Tech likes to hire cheap labor that's beholden to them.

Get ready for the plug to get pulled, because the day has finally arrived where the H1Bs are going the way of the dodo.

@d5

The claim that H1B workers are “fungible” and could all be “created from within” ignores the reality of global talent distribution and U.S. education pipelines. The U.S. produces about 80,000 computer science bachelor’s degrees annually (per NSF data), but tech firms alone report over 1 million unfilled STEM jobs (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024 projections). H1Bs fill hyper-specialized roles in AI, semiconductors, biotech, and software engineering where demand outstrips domestic supply—roles requiring PhDs or niche expertise from top global programs (e.g., IITs in India or Tsinghua in China).
• Evidence of non-fungibility: Companies like Google, Meta, and Tesla rely on H1Bs for 30-50% of their engineering hires in key areas (company visa filings via USCIS). Domestic graduates often lack the depth in emerging fields; for instance, the U.S. awards ~15,000 AI/ML PhDs yearly vs. global demand pushing H1B caps to 85,000 (lottery system). Replacing them “from within” would require decades of education reform, not instant creation in a 340M population.
• Economic multiplier: H1B-founded companies (e.g., Zoom by Eric Yuan, NVIDIA influence via Jensen Huang’s early team) create far more jobs than they “displace.” A 2023 NFAP study shows each H1B in tech creates 4-5 additional U.S. jobs through innovation and scaling.
Simply put, treating elite global talent as interchangeable with average domestic output is like saying any U.S. athlete could replace Olympic imports talent isn’t evenly distributed

@cx

What you don't realize is all those H1Bs could have also been US Citizens/Permanent Residents adding to the economy, founding companies, etc.

And don't confuse the issue. International students have nothing to do with H1Bs.

There's just nothing special about H1Bs. They're fungible, and in a country of 340 million people can all be created from within.

@cs

“Zero need”? Oh honey, bless your heart.

• 400K companies claw for 85K visas like it’s Black Friday at Best Buy—5× stampede.
• 1 million screaming job openings vs. ~200K domestic grads who mostly want to trade crypto or become TikTok influencers.
• 55% of unicorns? Yeah, built by the exact “unneeded” foreigners you’re trying to yeet.
Median H-1B: spry 32.
Median American coder: 43, googling “early retirement calculator.”
“Zero need” is peak galaxy-brain logic:
Google, Tesla, Nvidia, Zoom—just spontaneous miracles, like Jesus with the loaves, but for trillion-dollar companies.
Keep clutching those pearls, patriot.

The rest of us will be over here watching Canada and China inherit the 21st century while you cosplay 1955

@cs That 700k number is not just tech force. Its a mix of each and every field.

International students already inject $44 billion a year into U.S. universities, paying full tuition so American kids don’t have to. At public flagships, they’re the margin between balanced budgets and bankruptcy.

Then 70% stay on H-1B visas and create $1 trillion+ in economic value over their careers—founding companies (Google, Zoom, Tesla), paying taxes, and inventing the tech that keeps America #1.

Ki-l the pipeline and you get a brutal two-punch combo:

1. Universities instantly lose billions → tuition explodes, programs die, campuses close.
2. Tech loses its best talent → innovation moves to Canada, UK, China.
   We’re not just kicking out students.
   We’re torching the single biggest subsidy for American higher ed AND the engine of American tech dominance.

One d-mb policy and we hand our competitors both our universities and our future on a silver platter.

Keep screaming “America First” while we shoot ourselves in both feet.

Enjoy the collapse.

@bm The figure is over 700,000, but accepting your 700K number for the sake of argument: that 700K should be measured against the US tech workforce (a few million), not the overall US population. The population comparison is incorrect. My position is that we should allow even more than 700K, provided there is a need. However, the current need is effectively zero.

@cf

Yes I see L3 and L4. I can also tell you that I am underpaid when i look at these salaries, by a lot. The demand for these types of jobs is available in the USA.

@ce get your facts straight here is the LCA filed for h1b in 2025 by dell and please tell me how many level 1 and level 2 wages do you see here?

https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/dell-usa-lp-ew2xj4o6k3/lca/2025

For H1Bs visas there are many levels and each level has a payrate.

Level I: ~ $89,253/year
Level II: ~ $106,000/year
Level III: ~ $140,000/year
Level IV: ~ $163,257/year

H1Bs visas for Dell are level 1 and level 2 and they are below the local median wage.

Read this please:

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has broad discretion to set H-1B wage levels, that is, the minimum wage employers must pay their H-1B workers, which corresponds to the H-1B workers’ occupation and the region where they will be employed. By law, DOL must set four H-1B wage levels—which it does according to wage survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics survey. DOL has set the two lowest levels (of the four) well below the local median wage.

Wage-level data make clear that most H-1B employers—but especially the biggest users, by nature of the sheer volume of workers they employ—are taking advantage of a flawed H-1B prevailing wage rule to underpay their workers relative to market wage standards, resulting in major savings in labor costs for companies that use the H-1B. Further, our analysis of H-1B prevailing wage levels raises serious doubts about whether H-1B employers, including the top 30 H-1B employers and major U.S. technology firms, use the program solely, or even mostly, to hire workers with truly specialized skills.

Oh sure, IT companies totally can’t find American workers, poor things. Every day I hear the same tired nonsense at work: “We just don’t have enough skilled workers, boo-hoo.” Give me a break. They can hire U.S. talent, and if someone’s missing a skill, they could actually train them, you know, like responsible companies used to do.
But nope. Training costs money, and heaven forbid they spend a dime on that. Much easier to cry “skills shortage” and go chase H-1B workers so they can pay less and skip the investment. What a mystery, right? I mean, sure if a company needs some ultra-specialized surgeon, fine. But for IT jobs? Give me a break. There’s plenty of talent here already. Companies just want cheaper labor, plain and simple.

yeah... no fuqin sh!t lol? It's not that dell PREFERS these people it's simply that they are CHEAPER to hire. They hire sub par folks who are either underqualified or barely qualified and hope for the best. All because they are cheaper.

If any of these H1B people were citizens of the US and were applying, most would absolutely be passed up for an actual qualified person. But because they ARE H1B, they hire them because of.... MONEY!

@bm So I take it a "median wage in tech" includes someone working in a call center, doing tech support? Or some guy sitting in NOC at 2am?

You're not comparing apples to apples. H1Bs aren't being hired for a call center, they're being hired for the highest paying jobs.

And any way you cut it? They're taking a job that could have easily been filled by a US Citizen/Permanent resident.

You can't argue your way out of this one. H1Bs hurt working US citizens, and allow Big Tech to lower wages, as well as get a strangle on the H1Bs because they're beholden to the company to keep the visa. Fire 'em, and it's back to India.

700k H-1B workers have somehow become the villains in a country of 330,000,000.
That’s 0.4% of the workforce. 0.2% of the population.

📌 BLS Data:
• US median wage (all jobs): ~$49,500
• US median wage in tech: ~$105,990

📌 USCIS Data:
• Median H-1B compensation: ~$120,000

So H-1B workers are earning about $15,000 more than their American tech counterparts — and that’s BEFORE you factor in:

• Thousands in visa/legal fees
• Government audits and compliance
• Zero job security (lose job → leave the country)
• No guaranteed green card (that “path” is a myth)

Companies aren’t hiring H-1Bs because they’re “cheap.” They hire them because they’re qualified and they pay a premium for the privilege of dealing with the government.

Obviously, they couldn't care less about how H-1B affects the US worker. If they did, they would've done something about it. Asking CEOs to review the policy is useless. They are making so much money and are so removed from the workers that it is pointless to ask for help. The only way this policy gets reversed is if it affects the bottom line. Look at the decades of moving call centers overseas with people that can't help you. They haven't done anything about that one!!!

Dell's practice of annually renewing H-1B visas while simultaneously conducting layoffs that affect American workers raises significant concerns about the company's commitment to ethical labor practices. Given the current market, the claim that Dell cannot find qualified American candidates is highly questionable.

Michael, as we are required to complete annual ethical training, I urge you to re-evaluate the transparency and fairness of these hiring and layoff decisions. Perhaps hiring an expert (this Indian American professor) to assess and resolve these systemic labor issues is necessary. I have no issue with our H-1B colleagues, but the process appears inherently rigged against the American workforce.

Any company that hires H1-Bs over American citizens are not American. There is a difference between capitalism and greed. Every CEO today that I read about is a greedy POS and the worst part is that Americans let them get away with it. We need a good “example” of what happens when CEOs get too greedy.