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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

#131

Post by lazide »

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…

Not really, rather industry incentives switched from competing on quality (by whatever metric one might use), to competing on cost.

And developer costs had gotten so crazy, this was the perfect storm.

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

#132

Post by submeta »

diamond559 wrote: post #33
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!

It was an innovation project, with an endowment of 200k. The task was to implement an llm based bot platform in a company with 700+ coworkers. After demoing MVPs, got 40k and access to experts I never needed to use. Deployed open source AWS solution, built customizations, landing pages, and data crawlers entirely solo using AI coding agents over ~3 months while working on other projects. Zero consultants, zero internal help. Would have easily burned the full 200k the traditional way.

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

#133

Post by ido »

chongli wrote: post #113
vishnugupta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! $50k is ₹45,00,000 which is at the 95th percentile of tech salary in India across all levels of seniority. So yeah it’s not surprising that jobs are going offshore.

That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again? 3,00,00,000 instead of 30,000,000

It was extremely difficult to get used to when I was visiting India for a few months years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

chongli wrote: post #113
vishnugupta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! $50k is ₹45,00,000 which is at the 95th percentile of tech salary in India across all levels of seniority. So yeah it’s not surprising that jobs are going offshore.

That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again? 3,00,00,000 instead of 30,000,000

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by lazide »

sixtyj wrote: post #84
giantg2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management doesn’t have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :) We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I suppose…

Also, Indian culture has a huge ‘overpromise, then try to cover it up’ issue at all levels. Outsourcers have really mastered it though.

Source: lived in India for a year.

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

#136

Post by lazide »

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.

The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks who actually know things spend all their time selling new customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved out of the actual dev teams.

It’s genius, in a way.

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

#137

Post by throw-qqqqq »

chongli wrote: post #113
vishnugupta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! $50k is ₹45,00,000 which is at the 95th percentile of tech salary in India across all levels of seniority. So yeah it’s not surprising that jobs are going offshore.

That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again? 3,00,00,000 instead of 30,000,000

I am a European, so may be wrong, but it is my understanding that Indians have intuition around lakhs (100k) instead of thousands/millions. Apparently 100 lakhs is a crore (10M), but I haven’t seen that used so don’t know how prevalent it is - lakh is very commonly used though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

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

#138

Post by hexbin010 »

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

> 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

That's a pain management are willing to inflict upon /you/

CTOs are aware of all the tradeoffs

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

#139

Post by nradov »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #98
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…

If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business. So it follows that all American roles will be offshored eventually, including ownership of the company itself - or American businesses will be universally out competed.

Perhaps someday. But for now the USA has broader, deeper, and more sophisticated capital markets than every other country and economic bloc. This is one of the key reasons why most of the largest and fastest growing tech companies are still largely owned and located here.

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

#140

Post by lazide »

tuveson wrote: post #111
Spooky23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third generation folks in executive office all over. As a political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as well in many states. There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of…

> There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies. Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of t…

Yup, India is geopolitically right in the middle - and enjoying it.
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