So it's Thursday night, WWDC has been running all week (well, "running": it's just Apple dropping pre-recorded videos into a slick little app instead of the usual mob scene at the McEnery Center), and my Twitter timeline is 90% people arguing about whether the ARM transition is going to kill Boot Camp forever. I get it. Announcing that Macs are moving off Intel silicon after fifteen years is a genuinely huge deal and I'll probably write about it once I've actually gotten my hands on a dev kit unit, if I'm lucky enough to snag one. Craig Federighi doing the whole keynote from an empty kitchen set was weirdly charming too. But that's not actually what's been eating at me this week.
On Monday, buried under all the Apple Silicon noise, Trump signed a proclamation suspending new H-1B, H-2B, L-1, and J-1 visas through the end of the year. It went into effect Wednesday. If you don't work in tech or don't know anyone on a work visa this might have scrolled right past you, and honestly that's kind of the problem, and it landed in the same week as the biggest Apple hardware news in over a decade and got maybe a third of the coverage it deserved.
I want to be careful here because this isn't a partisan blog and never has been, not once in nine years of me typing into this thing. But I'm not going to pretend I don't have an opinion, because I do, and it's this: freezing the visa categories that actually staff most of Silicon Valley's engineering orgs, in the middle of a pandemic, dressed up as a jobs-protection measure, is bad policy dressed in a bad month. A guy I used to work with at my last job, a backend engineer who is honestly better at distributed systems than anyone else on that team was, has been waiting on an L-1 renewal since March. He doesn't know now if he's coming back from visiting his parents in August or not. That's not an abstraction to me, that's someone whose Slack messages I still have saved because they were funny.
Google's Sundar Pichai tweeted something within hours calling it a mistake that hurts American competitiveness, and Facebook and Amazon put out similar statements pretty fast too. Which, fine, good, I'm glad the big companies said something instead of staying quiet like they sometimes do. But statements aren't policy and none of that changes the calendar for the people actually affected. It's estimated this locks out well over a hundred thousand workers who would otherwise have gotten visas processed this year. A hundred thousand people whose plans just got shredded on a Monday afternoon while everyone was refreshing the WWDC live blog instead.
Here's my actual tangent, the one that has nothing to do with visas directly: I've always found the H-1B lottery itself kind of insane even before this week, separate from politics entirely. You're a company, you want to hire a specific, named, qualified person, and instead of just hiring them you enter a lottery — an actual random draw — for the privilege of maybe being allowed to. It's been that way since 2014 when demand outstripped the cap. Nobody designs a system that way on purpose if they're starting from scratch. It's just what accumulated over decades of patches on patches. This new suspension doesn't fix any of that underlying mess, it just adds a pause button on top of an already broken vending machine.
Anyway. New Mac Pro chips are cool, I guess I'll deal with Rosetta 2 and universal binaries and all that when the actual hardware shows up sometime next year. Right now I'm mostly thinking about the people who build half the stuff we cover on this blog and who, as of Wednesday, don't have a clear path back into the country if they leave it. That seems like the bigger story this week even if it's not the one trending.