California unemployment rises to 5.5%, worst in the U.S. as tech falters

At least we will be able to get jobs putting plastic forks in boxes now. Maybe we will be able to use those green GitHub tiles to negotiate better pay.

As a person of grayscale the contrast is undeniable.

"No More Offshore. Startups Look to Spend and Hire in U.S. Due to Trump Tax Change."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-startups-hiring-us-workers-30f...

I don't understand how Trump is allowing anything with headline like this.

Actually it was Nixon who single-handedly pushed manufacturing to China, and Reagan who pushed harder.

Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.

IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.

not my downvote btw

How is this Trump’s fault?

And as a white person it’s even more detestable still.

Since skin color somehow matters /s

I've been saying this on HN since 2022:

For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?

For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.

Unlike Florida, a state known for its orderly and mannered citizens. I think CA will be fine

It's really hard to reply without making a statement on politics but you really should diversify your news consumption.

I'll take "lawless" California over seeing the same Rankin cop watching a stop sign at the entrance to Braddock in order to write "rolling stop" tickets every 15 minutes. I also like that I don't have to worry about a police chief holding me at gunpoint because the fire alarm happened to go off while I was alone in a warehouse space that I was renting.

I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.

Back in the 90s, it was the opposite as miliary/aerospace declined in SoCal.

I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.

The lamp industry didn't go anywhere. The Camera industry didn't go anywhere. Might as well be saying, where has the CRT monitor or Macromedia Flash industry now?

I think defining industries this narrowly isn’t helpful

Once the bugs stack up, they'll call you back and it will be lots of billable hours. At least, that was the case for me; only took a few weeks before the clients own inconsistent requirements bite them in the ass. Gotta have a business+tech expert to make many products. AI is neither; and many folks can't prompt for shit (and can't spec for shit; and can't test for shit).

As per your article:

“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”

I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.

There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI

Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.

Looking at things in the micro scale and expecting it to translate directly into a macro scale is stupidity.

That's not the whole picture. There are less positions available where you tell someone else what to do and more competition for those positions.

Define “jobs.” A lot of the “jobs” created by offshoring production involved being service workers for the 25% of knowledge workers who benefit from offshoring.

This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.

If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.

The most common one is simply we wanted to cut heads and used ai as an excuse. Also AI spend is probably a huge drag on a lot of companies that are getting nothing off value but burning a lot

right, upon further research, there's no corresponding increase in LLC or EIN filings so the startup hypothesis is likely unsupported

Those businesses own all the social media, all the search engines, all the apps people discuss things on, and all the politicians.

> Many of those on visas are biased toward those from their own cultural heritage as well.

It’s not even “bias.” It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own. “It’s okay to be unfair to white people because they don’t need it like we do.”

I make the clarification because I’ve noticed it even among people who don’t have in-group bias. My mom quite dislikes other Bangladeshis, but only slowly realized over 30 years of living here that there are white-majority parts of the country with real economic challenges.

Among other possible attempts(?) that touched on the issue, here's one in 2024 that Republicans blocked in the Senate, where they "filibustered" it by voting "nay" on cloture.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/118-2024/s230

> Why didn't the Democrats

Alternate question: Why didn't the Republicans do something in the years before 2025 to fix the problem they created and which tech-company lobbyists absolutely told them about?

It wouldn't have been budget-neutral without a bunch of tax increases along with it which they don't have the spine to implement.

Because it was intended to offset losses in tax revenue from the 2017 tax cuts, and trying to undo those tax cuts would have been political suicide.

Crimethink

Both should be implemented.

If you are laying workers off you clearly don't need additional H1B workers. You should be barred for at least a year if not more from putting in any applications for H1B after any major layoff.

It should also be scrutinized if you preferably fire local workers over your H1B workers. Anybody caught doing so should be barred from H1B for a decade.

I like my H1B coworkers, but things have gone too far. You can't do layoffs and simultaneously put in applications for thousands of H1B workers. It makes no logical sense and should be illegal. The system is completely broken right now.

Not to mention most of this H1B work is not actually due to lack of local talent. Building a web or mobile app is not rocket science and there are plenty of people capable of doing so. Any company putting in H1B for anything but research positions or positions requiring exceptional expertise is probably abusing the system.

Possible, but that's not really what my friends in those areas are seeing. The only real industry there is medical - taking care of all the old folks.

Nice. I an researcher at MIT LL. In order to work at the lab you need to be a US citizen since a lot of it is federally funded. I tried to get my buddy, a Waterloo grad currently at Google, an interview but he is Canadian...

A zero-sum mindset on a website dedicated to programming of all places? Where we literally create wealth out of nothing but coffee and the strength of our minds?

My love for my country means I want it to be the greatest in the world. Waterloo grads make America better. Period.

The flip side should also be said, Canada and many other countries have talent drained by the US since they can't compete on pay.

It's hard to say, but who knows what could have been if the top Canadians had have to start or join Canadian companies and didn't have the option to take a higher pay in the US.

I like the way you think. As a Canadian, I’m disgusted that we educate our youth and then send them to the US to take jobs from Americans and pay taxes to the Americans. We should be putting them to work in Canada instead so we can build companies and industries in Canada instead of America.

/s, but not really.

The American dream in silicon valley was built in part by these folks. They stay here and become Americans both culturally and legally and it's fantastic. Some of them even become Republicans.

As others have pointed out it's not a zero sum game since human capital begets growth.

The sudden explosion in zero-sum thinking in the right wing will be studied for generations

“Canadians”, touché.

Not only is this mindset disgusting, it is completely wrong. Labor is not zero sum, jobs create more jobs. Immigrants are what has made this country great, allowing immigration was critical to the US becoming the industrial/financial/tech capital of the world. Shutting down immigration will weaken our economy, it will cost americans jobs.

there is no more american dream, and anyone who “creates” jobs in this economy and era of rampant hypercapitalism isn’t really enabling or transferring wealth.

if there were ample americans to do these jobs, they should be able to get them.

nationalism is a silly idea, anyway. and we should have free trade and movement with our biggest two allies. american exceptionalism is a joke

Of course visa mill down votes..

Why should US graduates compete with non-US workers in the US? Call me scared or incompetent or uncompetitive but I just don't want to compete in that way. All those people can stay in their countries and out-compete US grads there.

Well that's how you get competent foreign competitors, congratulations.

Indian software wages are about 1/3 US. The U.S. would need to tax them much more to dissuade outsourcing.

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Take a guess where majority of google cloud hiring is these days