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.
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
161–170 of 580 posts
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#162If 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.
It's true. Instead of talking about cutting jobs, we'd be talking about all the new companies building new things and AI itself wouldn't be the story.
Instead we're still talking about cost cutting. Seems the market is not focused on investing outside the AI moonshot gamble.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#163As 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.
No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies.
Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like.
It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print.
Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word you used in your comment... "collective."
The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for it.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#164There is incredible norlmancy bias lately and hopium. Yes it does and yes it will much much more. Preface all writings with "yet" if you will.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again. 2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located…
Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a competitive labor market.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again. 2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located…
Just a note on point 1:
As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket).
I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own culture which is different to that of the USA but, as with all things, there are A Lot of aspects of the culture here which are not admirable.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A lot of IT work that gets done in India is low skill things that could be automated even before AI codegen tools. These jobs are particularly vulnerable to AI productivity gains .
The thesis here is that current gen tools should enable 2 people do the work of 10 and LLM models get paid the budget of 2-3 devs.
The outsourcing org comes out ahead with spending only 70% as before (salary of remaining devs will naturally increase)
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India is by far the largest market for this. 1yr free is for same reason any VC funded company discounts their product or gives it free first, or Microsoft famously rather have you use their software pirated than not at all.
This is only to get adoption, if your workers only know how to code with Claude or Codex then you are going to buy those tools as a company
Nobody is going back once you get them to change. OpenAI et al hope to capture 30% value of the IT outsourcing sector while making to cheaper by 30%. There is no free lunch.
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The number of CS “grads” are not a useful metric for India.
The industry shifted to hiring other engineering streams to any grads with aptitude to learn a long while back.
The vast majority of them don’t have any programming skills, don’t have critical thinking skills, are poor at communication.
They are unemployable. Don’t take it from me, NASSCOM says this too.
The degrees are largely from mills that charge up to $80k-$100k (med degrees go even higher) promising jobs but don’t teach much.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#168Earlier 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…
You were being off shored before remote work was ever a thing lol.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#169Earlier 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.
I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.
If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of day).
I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997 or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or similar that can be done better and faster from home.
But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people in other offices is silly.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#170Earlier 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.
No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies. Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like. It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Workers need to…
> Talented workers get talented pay
> It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print.
Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth.