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AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

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Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#131

Post by jmyeet »

simianwords wrote: post #117
jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

These are common simple Marxist points you are bringing up. Your point hinges on: declining material conditions. It is completely false - the conditions are pretty great for everyone. People have good wages relatively but sure inequality is increasing. Since your main point is incorrect I don’t think your other points follow.

There are many ways to attack this assertion. For example:

1. The stagnation or decline in real wages in the developed world in recent decades;

2. Increasing homelessness as a consequence of the housing affordability crisis;

3. How global poverty has increased in the last century under capitalism. This surprises some because defenders claim the opposite. China is singlehandedly responsible to massive decrease in extreme poverty in the 20th century.

Maybe you're looking through the lens of tech. After all, we all have Internet-connected supercomputers in our pockets. While that's true, we're also working 3 jobs to pay for a 1 bedroom apartment where once a single job meant you had a house and enough to eat.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#132

Post by somenameforme »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #109
grues-dinner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster. It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap. At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.

Do you think you could do a better job than a CEO of public company [x] from a technical standpoint - in other words, omitting the connections and public-facing charisma that they typically bring as part of the package?

I genuinely do, but kind of paradoxically also suspect I'm wrong. It's simply that it's something so far outside my domain that I just can't really appreciate their skills honed over many years of practice and training, because all I get to externally see are their often ridiculous limitations, failures, and myopia.

I imagine this is, in many ways, how people who have no understanding of e.g. software, let alone software development, see software engineers. I don't think it's uncharitable, it's just human nature. Imagine if we were the ones hiring CEOs. 'That guys a total asshat, and we can get ten guys in India - hard working, smart guys, standouts in 1.4 billion people - for the same price.' Go go go.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#133

Post by golol »

simianwords wrote: post #102
torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

What you are saying is not intuitive. Software engineers are a cost to software companies. With automation the profits would increase so I’m not sure how it can lead to recession.

More middlemen = more revenue/GDP, right?

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#134

Post by notyourwork »

simianwords wrote: post #113
notyourwork wrote: post #28

I can see this. We employ a lot of off shore for what we call support engineering. Things like jdk upgrades or cert updates. It’s grunt work that lets higher paid engineers utilize their time on business value work. As AI continues to grow in scope, it will surely commandeer much of this. Employing a human is more expensive when compared to compute for these tasks at a certain scale.

Can I ask how the offshore team manages to deploy these changes? What skills are required for such a role in support engineering?

Through the CI/CD deployment pipeline that all code changes get deployed through. Primary engineering team reviews code and ensures things are tested appropriately.

If it requires a managed change, engineering team helps them draft the execution and schedule.

Skills would be similar to IT or dev ops but with expectation that they can code.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#135

Post by simianwords »

jmyeet wrote: post #131
simianwords wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are common simple Marxist points you are bringing up. Your point hinges on: declining material conditions. It is completely false - the conditions are pretty great for everyone. People have good wages relatively but sure inequality is increasing. Since your main point is incorrect I don’t think your other points follow.

There are many ways to attack this assertion. For example: 1. The stagnation or decline in real wages in the developed world in recent decades; 2. Increasing homelessness as a consequence of the housing affordability crisis; 3. How global poverty has increased in the last century under capitalism. This surprises some because defenders claim the opposite. China is singlehandedly responsible to massive decrease in extr…

Your first and last points are egregiously incorrect. A simple google search will tell you this.

Extreme poverty throughout the world has dramatically reduced. In Western Europe it came down from 50% to less than 1% through the 20th century.

India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

Wages has been increasing in china, India as well as USA after accounting for inflation. It’s sort of stagnant in Europe.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#136

Post by [deleted] »

ido wrote: post #75
torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

Historically imporvments in programmer productivity (e.g. via better languages, tooling and hardware) didn't correlate to a decrease in demand for programemrs, but quite the opposite.

[deleted]

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#137

Post by simianwords »

notyourwork wrote: post #134
simianwords wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask how the offshore team manages to deploy these changes? What skills are required for such a role in support engineering?

Through the CI/CD deployment pipeline that all code changes get deployed through. Primary engineering team reviews code and ensures things are tested appropriately. If it requires a managed change, engineering team helps them draft the execution and schedule. Skills would be similar to IT or dev ops but with expectation that they can code.

With a ci/cd in place and a reviewer from the devs it’s probably very less value that the offshore employees are providing.

Moreover these kind of upgrades sometimes involve unforeseen regressions which again can’t be solved by these employees.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#138

Post by commandlinefan »

donperignon wrote: post #42

Yes, I agree. And it is not that AI is any good, but those outsourcing shops are most of the time not adding any value, all the contrary takes time to babysit them. Some of this even look like an elaborate scam, someone in the organization launder money through this companies somehow, otherwise I don’t understand how they are useful. Obviously there some good ones, but in my experience is not the norm.

> launder money through this companies

That would explain a lot, actually. If so, it'll be interesting to see what happens to the overall software economy when that revenue stream dries up. My wife grew up in Mexico on a border town and told me that the nightclubs in her town were amazing; when she moved to the US, she was disappointed by how drab the nightclubs here were. Later she found out that the border town nightclubs were so extravagant because they were laundering drug money. When they cracked down on the money laundering, the nightclubs reverted back to their natural "drab" state of relying on actual customers to pay the bills.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#139

Post by kelseyfrog »

jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

The ownership class and the labor class both suffer from a coordination problem.

The former from the coordination problem of extracting wealth but not fast enough that it solves the coordination problem for the labor class who, like you said, have strike first and revolt second as their battles of last resort.

The ownership class can voluntarily reduce wealth inequality, and they have before, but as history progresses and time marches on, so do the memories fade of what happens when they don't, pushing them closer and closer to options they don't want to admit work.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#140

Post by grues-dinner »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #109
grues-dinner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster. It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap. At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.

Alternatively, when your outsourcing agency finds they have accidentally assigned you an actually good engineer, term used loosely, that you're not paying for (they know this happens when the engineer gets up to speed with your codebase at all), "your guy" is replaced with another guy who inherits the name, the email address and the SSH key.

And if the agency doesn't do that, the good engineer will figure out he's being underpaid as slop-for-hire cannon fodder and move on his own accord.

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