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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

#171

Post by hackandthink »

heywoods wrote: post #74

This article gets the phenomenon right but the causation wrong: it's not "AI spending vs. AI replacing jobs". both are happening simultaneously, and they're causally linked. The spending-revenue gap is real. Hyperscalers are projected to spend $300-550B on AI infrastructure in 2025[1] while generative AI revenue won't exceed $30-40B [2]. Amazon's capex jumped from $48B in 2023 to $84B in 2024 to a projected $100B+ in…

"they're cutting jobs because they know AI spending will pay off."

They think they know.

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

#172

Post by moneywoes »

oxfordmale wrote: post #160
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.

Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence. In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online…

> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

In those locations?

Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

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

#173

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There’s no way we could have hired all this specialized talent in any one city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-person dynamics, but I can’t imagine how you’d build this kind of team without remote work.

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

#174

Post by whoknowsidont »

paulddraper wrote: post #170
whoknowsidont wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth.

Which to be clear: is not happening.

They're buying very low cost labor and are hoping to power through it for some sweet juicy numbers.

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

#175

Post by alfiedotwtf »

CivBase wrote: post #91
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.

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.

Kind of ironic and hypocritical that companies forced people back into the office, but have zero fucks about remote offshoring!

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

#176

Post by justapassenger »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #163
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.

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. But global average of talented pay is much different than average of talented pay in HCOL areas.

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

#177

Post by alfiedotwtf »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #147
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business. Indeed, however other business roles have a significant physical presence or face to face component. Sales & marketing, legal, HR, and significant parts of operations and admin have physical presence requirements in most businesses. I would expect finance/accounting to be vulnerable to offshoring, though.

Accounting and bookkeeping already is

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

#178

Post by _aavaa_ »

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…

This argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced remote work with unions. All that power and opportunity and they squandered it thinking their bosses and management was on their side.

Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have magically protected you these layoffs.

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

#179

Post by luckylion »

lazide wrote: post #136
diamond559 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that promise to have all the people you need and can either do entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers, QA, project managers etc on short notice.

They have a few very competent developers who are primarily in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales contact is between non-technical management and their front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the second sales contact, technical staff from the potential client is involved and they bring along their real developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the project. They'll give you interviews with the developers you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't touch type and develop purely by trial and error without forming a mental model.

If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to them. At some point even a junior developer is better than not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that and they'll get replaced first.

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

#180

Post by osigurdson »

I'd say the biggest problem is AI complacency, something like: "in the future our revenues will be the same but won't need any people". So, in order to prepare for this future the obvious course of action to do some layoffs and just chill for a while. The problem is, we don't really know when this future will happen. If it is soon, maybe companies are making the right bet, if not it is more like a deliberate choice to slow down. That's fine if one or a few companies choose this path as competition will correct the error. However, if they essentially all move in unison competition won't fix the problem and we'll have a self-inflicted economic contraction for no reason.

The other factor is, will revenues really stay the same for companies once we have AGI / super intelligence? It seems value will not accrue to the companies that are in chill mode.

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