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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

fastcompany.com

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Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#31

Post by random9749832 »

diamond559 wrote: post #25
Glyptodon wrote: post #20

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in r…

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing.

Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#32

Post by simonw »

pants2 wrote: post #9

That's an interesting point that I haven't considered before: that the narrative of AI replacing jobs plus the widespread cheating in school using LLMs is making students less engaged and new graduates less employable, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for AI.

This is one of the aspects of AI ethics that I don't think gets nearly enough attention: the general psychological effect that information about AI has on people, regardless of their interactions with the tools themselves.

Students getting lazy, or dropping out of subjects entirely because they don't think they have a future in them.

Depression and a general feeling of despair. I see this in programming communities quite a bit - people who see LLMs as an existential threat to their careers and that they have wasted their lives getting good at something which is now being devalued.

"ChatGPT psychosis" - where people talk to LLMs and have unhealthy thought patterns reinforced by them to disastrous ends - gets a ton of coverage. But what about these milder but still meaningful effects where the very existence of AI disrupts people's future plans and self-worth even if they're not using it at all?

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#33

Post by diamond559 »

submeta wrote: post #15

This does not reflect my reality. I have worked on half a dozen projects where we would have hired consultants to get the job done but have used coding agents to document, understand, migrate a project, create backend services, dashboards, and other things with budgets ranging from a few thousand euros to 200,000 euros. No consultants hired, nothing spent.

What job did the llm do that was worth 200k Euro to you? Be extremely specific w/ hours worked etc bc we all totally believe you!

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#34

Post by zero_shift »

goalieca wrote: post #6

I can't read the article but that won't stop me from commenting.. This year alone something like 400B was spent on investing in chips, datacenters, electricity buildouts. That's 400B that could have otherwise been invested in people. While i don't doubt that people will find a few solid business cases for LLMs, i am on team-bubble. I don't think this investment will add 400B worth of value and I very much doubt that…

Imagine if 10% of that money had been spent just training young people, or on a new cohort of PhDs. Imagine what benefits we would have reaped in a decade's time.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#36

Post by alephnerd »

diamond559 wrote: post #25
Glyptodon wrote: post #20

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in r…

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well.

Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async.

If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a short term bid to compete against bootcamps.

If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#37

Post by [deleted] »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #3

A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I never visited before... What are they using to determine how many articles I've read? Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never was an overstatement?).

[deleted]

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#38

Post by alecco »

alephnerd wrote: post #36
diamond559 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well. Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async. If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sus…

Are they investing tens of billions in new offices in those non-Indian countries?

My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#39

Post by dahart »

diamond559 wrote: post #24
dahart wrote: post #13

If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all,…

AWS is making more money, they are not making money running llms. The companies didn't want to reveal internal procedures and exact profit/loss statements, is that surprising to this article writer? Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy than this stonk pumper site.

> Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy that this stock pumper site.

Oh I totally agree with you, this was just the first thing that came up in a Google search. The criticism of MIT’s study has been going around widely, this site isn’t the only one saying that this study lacks objective metrics.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#40

Post by a24j »

MangoToupe wrote: post #22
pants2 wrote: post #9

That's an interesting point that I haven't considered before: that the narrative of AI replacing jobs plus the widespread cheating in school using LLMs is making students less engaged and new graduates less employable, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for AI.

Surely this would be indicated by a glut of unfilled job postings.

Here: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/02/nx-s1-5591302/ghost-jobs-are-...
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