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Is it AI or just good ol' offshoring? Mix of both? If AI can just make any dev 10-20% more efficient that's a whole lot of jobs no longer needed.
At least that's the dominant narrative since a decade. And I'm sure it's actually true, and least when the question is about knowing all youtokgram memes of the day.
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80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing. The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
> while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butt…
Is it AI or just good ol' offshoring? Mix of both? If AI can just make any dev 10-20% more efficient that's a whole lot of jobs no longer needed.
Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across ti…
If you look at statistics for typical IT offshoring and near shoring markets like India, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria they have been in crisis since 2022. Only to show a slight rebound in Q1 of 2025.
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))) Yeah that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee. It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
If it's control, you get the same in CEE and India with restrictive non-compete clauses that would make Illinois look like an open market, frivolous lawsuits, and no-objection certificates. Control doesn't impact my bottom line. Reality is, H1B hiring is just as impacted as normal hiring in the US.
You cant have offshore workers away from family, alone in a foreign country, with an RTO mandate, and glued to a desk in SF, constantly worried about deportation. This is about control, power, and abuse.
It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions. Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work.
Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
Your Sr engineer is also still distracted and focused on those tasks.
Junior engineers come up with new ideas, can eventually put the whole system together. There's never just one code base.
What Ai tools are replacing engineers? I finay tried cursors free tier yesterday and it right off the bat misunderstood my code and made up library implementation details.
I always had hard times finding a job with every job search I did. Even living in San Francisco
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> while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butt…
B2B. Use an employer of record type setup. You are an employee of a shell in the country you reside, the real 'employer' is just buying a B2B service.
Plenty of major tech hubs in CEE and India give 80-100% tax rebates or PLIs to foreign companies opening and hiring locally IF they also mandate RTO in those offices.
They tend to recover the cost through income tax and VAT.
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.