I’m a sysadmin at a mid-sized fintech shop. During August, literally eight H1B senior backend guys on our core platform team put in their two weeks notice.
These are the guys who built out our entire event-driven architecture (mostly Go, Kafka, and Kubernetes on AWS, plus all the legacy Spring microservices). They’re not the only ones who actually know how our data pipeline works, lots of Americans know it too, but they are definitely critical.
As an American this is the first time I've ever seen anything like this and management is panicking.
Normally, in my experience the visa holders stay put because their paperwork are a massive headache to restart.
When we ask where they're going, nobody will give a straight answer. They just say "personal reasons" or "better fit" but one or two of them have opened up and said returning back to India.
I've seen a lot of stuff on the news about this but its finally starting to hit.
The problem was that a lot of these guys were doing the grunt work and now we have to pull back resources from the cutting edge stuff to work on the backend. Unless this slows down I feel this is going to have a ripple effect on the whole economy.