In my industry they don’t import them.

They simply change where the remote work is done. It means warehouses of workers are working overnight for US companies to render services to US citizens. These used to be US based jobs until the C-suite decided offshoring was cheaper and had a vindictive streak for US work from home employees.

And, level II for automated support are low cost humans who are not empowered to do anything. Just repeat the script and dump the call.

I think you are right about the cash grab.

In SaaS, the classic idea is you pay lower costs incrementally and you can more discretely adjust for consumption (e.g. AWS can grow or reduce according to your monthly consumption needs). They always compare this to a high priced server or a IBM/Western Union cash register (B4B) which would mean insane expense with significant amounts of wasted consumption because you pay for tiers of what you don’t need.

This makes sense and works if everyone is a good actor.

What we seem to be seeing is that isn’t the case (surprise people are greedy, abusive, criminals).

Rather than enabling scaled consumption the monthly or SaaS incremental payments are just low enough for you to see it as too much of an inconvenience to fight a charge. They use the automation and pointless cheap headcount to make it so annoying you just surrender the 100s of dollars that they robbed you of. It isn’t worth your personal time and, in the case of B2B, you are fighting for your employers benefit anyway. Either, you sacrifice hours of your own time or you fight for a company that underpays and under appreciates you.

This will destroy trust, which we already are seeing with AI “tokens.”

The real crooks will find a way to force you to buy their stuff through corrupt politicians or exclusivity. You want to visit a national park. You need GrocParkAI credits to find the right trail for you. You need MedGroczi to activate your medical discount Medicaire replacement. If you bank with US Fargo you have to use Crytpogrokss to transfer funds.

There won’t even be an illusion of choice.

Wait until the NSF cuts fully hit. We are tanking everywhere.

You probably won’t notice some of the STEM cuts but our healthcare system is going down hard.

Many NIH grants are gone or messed up now as well.

Good luck without grad students, funded research, or supported labs.

I’m guessing we will be relocating the orange groves to New Jersey at some point anyway.

They can even use it to make the finest New Jersey wine on the market.

I’m hiring for a few positions right now. All would have been entry level in the US. College Grads and early career folks. We now source mostly out of the Philippines for new College Grads and earlier career folks for all entry level jobs.

If you hire from the top, they are mostly the same skill level but 1/4th the cost.

My suspicion is the C-suite now believes that if they are going to pay people to work from home they might as well have them working remotely from home in the Philippines than in the US.

I don’t agree with any of this. It is just what seems to be the movement for a lot of remote work companies, both big and small.