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.
Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I’ve interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren’t anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job, I’ll probably get bored and frustrated by it. High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who’s been tempted by the pay and releva…
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
181–190 of 580 posts
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cu…
Sorry to burst your bubble but, I love living in my T3 city I was born in.
Don't talk for 1.4 billion people.
Thanks.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#183Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#184This 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…
Having dealt with A LOT of Accenture “devs”, how do I leverage the barn and then some to short Google!
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the aspects of AI ethics that I don't think gets nearly enough attention: the general psychological effect that information about AI has on people, regardless of their interactions with the tools themselves. Students getting lazy, or dropping out of subjects entirely because they don't think they have a future in them. Depression and a general feeling of despair. I see this in programming communities q…
Btw, the recent Conversations with Tyler had a few minutes on this topic with Sam: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-tyl... It was a bit towards the end, I think.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#186As 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.
It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#187As 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…
Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs.
Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed.
Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#188This 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…
Funny to me how many of the replies to this comment are assuming you mean all these "punk" startups will be possible because of AI, when your actual comment says nothing of the sort.
340 millon Americans. Reach 10k of them at 10 bucks a month and you have a business that pays for a couple people to live comfortably.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#189Earlier 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.
If all the high earners are off shore, may as well sell to them with an off shore sales team.
Don't need local marketers if the market isn't local anymore.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#190As 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…
All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.
Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.
But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.
'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.
This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.