Live data from Hacker News

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

fastcompany.com

61–70 of 580 posts

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

#61

wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin but fancy auto complete.

Probably could be repurposed for something else though?

You can already buy cheap but powerful old servers. But newer hardware tends to be more power efficient. So, depending on time horizon you consider, it might be cheaper to buy newer hardware.

Assuming that GPUs power efficiency will increase, the same will be true about them.

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

#62

wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin but fancy auto complete.

Probably could be repurposed for something else though?

what else could possibly use that much compute? especially somewhat specialized compute, not suited for general purpose compute?

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

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, You mean cost of living and inflation has devalued the dollar.

London has a similar CoL as San Francisco yet tech salaries are around 33%-50% what are offered in the Bay. Same with Toronto. On top of that, both the British and Canadian governments give some degree of tax subsidy and regulatory support, though not to the degree that India, Israel, Poland, Czechia, or Romania provide. Why should I pay Jeff from NCSU a US$175K TC in RTP when I can get Jane who chose to return to To…

I hear this, but the fact is a 70% pay cut in the Bay Area would simply not be workable at all. You don't just cut out Starbucks and Amazon junk.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ht…

It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons).

So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.

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

#65

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…

Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles.

If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?

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

#66
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ht…

It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a…

Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ht…

No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers speak for themselves.

Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country.

https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer...

When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues.

That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India.

You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India.

Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ht…

No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers speak for themselves. Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country. https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer... When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea…

Here you go, h1b hires still get paid American salaries so that throws the whole 'they get hired because they are cheap' argument out of the window: https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-tru...

>70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself.

Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.

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

#69
post #29

This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices. Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening: Micros…

A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work .

It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training.

Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that.

Any compute investment is largely local . Internet and Electricity is expensive and erratic, there is red tape, loads of import duties, there are dozens of cheaper places for cheap data centers.

All this to say it is not the kind of outsourcing you think it is.

—-

There is a some amount of high tech outsourcing happening, those are driven by challenges in getting even a business visa in last 5 years.

those numbers are quite small in aggregate won’t be news worthy.

India simply does not have that kind of high quality talent pool .

The education system is both expensive and very poor. There is shortage of qualified teachers, even bigger shortage of good ones. Students and parents just want to get a “degree” /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to learn.

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

#70

This should shock no one. Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home, with a stim…

I think you're on to something, but interest rates probably have to come down a bit more for it to really have legs. We definitely need a response to enshittification though.
Post reply on HN