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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

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

#101

Post by alecco »

manquer wrote: post #69
alecco wrote: 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 .…

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

Then why are they giving one year of free accounts for developers to the whole country? Remember they have about one million CS graduates every year. Do you see the scale of costs?

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

#102

Post by skywhopper »

echelon wrote: post #94
dehrmann wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overse…

Nah, none of this is precisely true. Even if the folks abroad are just as skilled (true), they aren’t as effective because of primarily time zone differences and also language barriers (which is exacerbated by the time zone differences).

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

#103

Post by skywhopper »

dingnuts wrote: post #83
dehrmann wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets

Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.

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

#104

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

dehrmann wrote: post #78
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…

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore.

Just outright insane.

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

#105

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

zkmon wrote: post #85
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the distinction is worth making, since if it was actual AI replacing jobs, i.e. AI that is capable enough, today, to do someone's job, or more likely to increase someone's productivity so that headcount can be reduced, then that would seem a permanent shift and is only going to ratchet up. OTOH, if it is only dreams of AI, manifested as AI spending, or CEOs laying people off thinking that AI will soon (even…

Spending is happening only because, it promises to replace workers. And that possibility arises only because AI exists. Spending is only a means, not a cause.

Sure, but is the cause "AI" (here today, doing someone's job), or "promise of AI" (that may never materialize anytime soon, either in quantity or capability).

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

#106

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

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.

In the span of like 2 yrs?

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

#107

Post by bossyTeacher »

alephnerd wrote: post #60
nabbed wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being dense. What are GCCs and NCGs? I guess GCC night be Global Capability Center?

GCC - Global Capacity Center, basically instead of outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM, a company creates an entire office abroad that owns profit-loss, product roadmap, has executives present, and is a direct part of the company. NCG - New College Grad You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking questions!

So GCC is basically a subsidiary in another country?

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

#108

Post by munificent »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #104
dehrmann wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t ju…

Remote work benefits workers too, though:

1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.

2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live.

3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.

In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.

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

#109

Post by J_Shelby_J »

csullivannet wrote: post #95

If AI really generates the value it claims to cutting jobs is short sighted. If existing human knowledge is commoditized, then we should be able to invest in generating new knowledge, and creating new kinds of products that were not even possible before.

And if AI makes workers more efficient, then businesses not actively hiring more employees are admitting that even with extra resources they have no strategy to grow their business. Like, if one person is effective as ten people, then a business should be able to grow quicker since their operating costs are effectively lower freeing up capital for growth.

So either their business is a dead end, the inefficiency is at the management layer, or AI isn’t actually making workers more efficient.

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

#110

Post by Ekaros »

thesmtsolver wrote: post #97
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overse…

Any data backing this? If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US? Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.

It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.
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