r/IndiaEOR

When JD Vance said new H-1B visa issuance was “down about 90%,” most people focused on immigration politics.

But I think the more important story is what happened to the jobs.

Because the roles didn’t disappear.

A lot of them simply moved.

I’ve been noticing this pattern for months now talking to founders and engineering leaders. Earlier, companies would sponsor aggressively, relocate talent to the US, and build teams around H-1B pipelines.

Now many are asking:
“Why fight visa uncertainty if the work can happen from India anyway?”

Especially after visa delays, higher compliance costs, lottery unpredictability, and new administrative restrictions started piling up. Even immigration lawyers have been saying companies are reconsidering sponsorship and shifting work overseas instead.

And honestly, remote infrastructure is already good enough now that a senior engineer sitting in Bengaluru can contribute almost identically to someone sitting in Austin or Seattle.

That’s the part I think policymakers underestimate.

Reducing visas does not automatically bring all those jobs back locally. In many cases, companies still need the talent, they just hire the same people remotely.

One VP of Engineering I spoke with recently said their company stopped planning around the H-1B lottery entirely. Instead, they started building distributed engineering teams directly in India through partners like Wisemonk because it was simply more predictable operationally.

Feels like the global tech workforce is becoming location-flexible faster than immigration systems can adapt to it.

Something that keeps coming up in founder finance conversations is how India payroll gets treated as a fixed cost once salaries are agreed in local currency, without much thought given to what that looks like on the dollar side. India tends to be where this surfaces most visibly, given how many US and UK teams are now running meaningful headcount there.

The problem seems to be that revenue sits in dollars while payroll moves in rupees, and that gap can drift quietly. The same engineer budgeted at roughly $24K annually can effectively cost $26K or $22K depending on where exchange rates move that year, same person, same role, just a different FX environment.

When that compounds across 20 or 30 employees, plus bonuses and reimbursements, it tends to stop being an HR problem and becomes a CFO problem fairly fast. What many teams realize too late is that their India labor costs were never actually fixed; their FX assumptions were.

Companies that run payroll through an Employer of Record platform, Wisemonk, Deel, Multiplier, Rippling are the ones that come up most often in these conversations, tend to find that having payroll executed locally in the employee's currency, with clear FX visibility on their end, removes at least one layer of that unpredictability.

The payroll software handles the local disbursement, contracts, and compliance, so finance at least knows exactly where the variance is coming from.

For those who have built out India teams of meaningful size, how did your finance team eventually get comfortable with payroll budgeting across currencies?

I’ve noticed this becoming a surprisingly sensitive topic lately.

People frame it as “US jobs being replaced by India jobs,” but from what I’m seeing in payroll and international hiring, that’s not really the full picture.

Most startups aren’t replacing entire US teams with India teams.

What’s actually happening is that startups are becoming more globally distributed from day one.

A few years ago, a startup might hire everyone locally because remote infrastructure wasn’t mature yet.

Now founders are much more comfortable building teams across multiple countries, especially after remote work became normalized.

India ends up being part of that strategy because of three things:

• strong engineering and operational talent
• ability to scale teams relatively quickly
• significantly better cost efficiency for startups

For early-stage companies, this changes survival math.

Instead of hiring 3 people in one geography, they may be able to build a team of 6–8 globally.

That doesn’t necessarily mean US roles disappear. In many cases, companies keep leadership, product direction, sales, or customer-facing roles closer to their primary market while scaling engineering or operations globally.

What is changing is hiring expectations.

Startups now ask:

“Does this role need to be location-specific?”

If the answer is no, they often hire globally.

And honestly, I think AI is accelerating this trend even more.

As teams become smaller and more productivity-focused, founders care less about geography and more about output, ownership, and speed.

India benefits from that because the talent ecosystem is already mature and globally integrated.

So from what I’ve seen, this isn’t really “replacement.”

It’s more that startups are redesigning how teams are built altogether.

Curious how others see this. Are global teams becoming the default now, or do location-based teams still matter long term?

Feels like every US startup and tech company is exploring India hiring differently rn.

Personally I think most of the companies start with an Employer of Record (EOR) in India because it's the fastest and lowest-risk way to hire initially.

Curious to see what model people here are seeing most often in 2026.

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A pattern I keep seeing in startup hiring discussions is that most companies approach India with a default assumption already baked in, usually that it is a place for support functions, QA, or back-office roles. India tends to be the first international market US and UK teams explore, which makes how that first team gets shaped a more consequential decision than it might initially seem.

The debate between building a core product team versus a support team seems to come down to how much distributed ownership a company is actually ready for. Founders who go straight to core engineering or product hires often report faster output, stronger retention, and higher employee engagement, but also more management strain early on.

The support team path tends to feel safer and easier to justify internally, but many teams realize it creates a ceiling on what the India office can ever become. There is a growing sense that companies which treat their India teams as extensions of the core product org from the start tend to scale that office more effectively than those who retrofit it later.

For those who have built teams in India, did you start with support or core roles, and would you make the same call again?

I think India is no longer “cheap labor.” It’s strategic labor.

I’ve been working with US founders hiring in India for a while now, and honestly… the conversation has changed a lot.

A few years ago, it was always: “Can we save costs if we hire in India?”

Now it’s more like: “Can we build a strong team there fast enough?”

That shift says everything.

Yes, India is still cost-efficient. But the reason companies stay isn’t cost, it’s the talent and how quickly teams can actually ship.

I’ve seen India teams own full product modules, lead engineering pods, even drive roadmap decisions. Not “support work.” Real, core stuff.

And this isn’t just big tech anymore. Even early-stage startups are building serious teams here. Some of the setups I’ve seen through Wisemonk EOR, for example, are basically extensions of the main team, same ownership, same expectations.

I think the “cheap labor” label stuck around way longer than it should have.

Because what’s actually happening now is:
companies are using India to build capability, not just cut costs

And once that clicks, the whole hiring strategy changes.

Just curious, if you’re working with India teams today, do they still feel like offshore support… or just part of your core team now?

I think a lot of global founders misread this when hiring in India.

In the US startup world, job-hopping and high-risk bets are pretty normal. In India, many employees think differently because a stable salary often supports family responsibilities, loans, and long-term financial planning.

So when candidates ask about funding, notice periods, or job security, it’s usually not a lack of ambition. They just want predictability before taking a risk.

I’ve also noticed that strong candidates in India don’t just evaluate salary anymore. They look at how stable and serious the company feels overall.

That’s why startups that communicate clearly, run payroll properly, and create structured processes tend to hire better here. Even companies building teams through providers like Wisemonk usually realize pretty quickly that operational stability matters a lot for retention.

Curious if others hiring in India have noticed the same thing?

I have been noticing more global companies quietly expanding AI engineering teams outside the US. India keeps coming up in those discussions, especially because many engineers there already have experience working on distributed global products.

A lot of the early AI conversation assumed engineering demand would shrink. What seems to be happening instead is that companies are changing what kind of engineers they hire. LinkedIn’s latest numbers showing India with the fastest AI engineering hiring growth globally at nearly 60% YoY felt like a pretty strong signal.

The pattern many teams seem to realize now is:

• AI-native product engineers
• infra and MLOps talent
• engineers comfortable shipping with copilots
• distributed AI teams operating across time zones

That demand appears to be increasing, not slowing down.

What also stands out is that companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft are building more core AI capability in India rather than treating it like a support extension. That feels materially different from the outsourcing wave people talked about 10 years ago.

Curious what other founders or engineering leaders are seeing when hiring AI talent globally.