Indeed Hiring Lab looked at where the clicks on US job postings come from, and software development stands out. The share of clicks from outside the country fell from 14.3% in the first quarter of 2025 to 12.5% a year later, the largest decline of any occupation in the analysis. At the same time, about 0.2% of US tech postings mention visa sponsorship. Two tenths of one percent.
I read those together as a simple statement: international engineers are losing interest in US roles at the same time US employers are, in practice, not offering them a path in. Whatever the causes, and the post is careful about them, the effect on how teams get built is the part I can speak to.
If the talent is not coming to the work, the work goes to the talent. I helped build engineering teams in Krakow and Bangalore, and the reason was never only cost. It was that the people we wanted were there, and the alternative was waiting for them to be here. Numbers like these make that alternative less and less realistic.
My view is that a globally distributed engineering organization is becoming the default shape, not the special case, and the skills that matter are the ones that make it work: managers who can run a team they rarely see, written norms, a culture that treats a remote office as part of the team and not a supplier.
Where is the next engineer you hire going to be sitting?
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