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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

#201

Post by cj »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #174
paulddraper wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter) an inherently worse developer than someone in the US?

(Unless that’s not what you’re implying?)

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

#202

Post by bonesss »

lazide wrote: post #135
sixtyj wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap.

Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.

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

#203

Post by izacus »

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

People in Brazil and Mexico can work within US timezones just fine and aren't dumb.

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

#204

Post by phil21 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #194
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.

Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home. Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and tha…

Everything about this is the opposite from my experience.

No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to now competing directly with the largest names in the industry for those workers.

It is not hard at all to employ people “directly” in most countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up a local “office” with a cheap office manager and attorney on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and structure might be opaque, but the end result is effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with them is concerned.

Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.

Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire world now in any even moderately sized city. It’s not 2005 any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this anywhere I’ve done business.

I’ve worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me, and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.

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

#205

Post by tamimio »

AI is just the scapegoat; otherwise we should see jobs like administrative assistant, legal, and medical replaced first. But I also think engineering is the worst field to get into. It's neither protected by a license like other white-collar jobs nor by a union like most blue-collar jobs. You end up overworked plus debt from school like white-collar workers but getting paid worse than blue-collar workers. And everyone's okay with that for some reason. Not a single organization is trying to change it. The government is happy with it, companies are obviously loving it, and on top of that, engineers are building the systems to replace them in a few years and they still think they are smart..

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

#206

Post by overfeed »

phil21 wrote: post #195
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.

One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime. I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr. One the dam broke and it was cle…

It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers due to shutdowns.

The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to in their employment contract) if they clone their product from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence - as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL

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

#207

Post by pizlonator »

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.

I think other business roles have been offshored for a long time now, and software engineering is relatively late to that party

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

#208

Post by torginus »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #118
munificent wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

I'm not super familiar with either country, but I feel like that's not really true

this is comparing Seattle and Mumbai

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap stuff is much worse than in the US though).

Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-bar-none access to financial services, with abundant cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on the same income.

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

#209

Post by nine_k »

makingstuffs wrote: post #166
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

While what you write is correct, the parent speaks about the most expensive tier of Indian cities, which are quite a bit nicer.

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

#210

Post by lisbbb »

_heimdall wrote: post #119
monero-xmr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Western countries are devaluing their currency. No other way to reduce the debt. Cutting benefits is political suicide. Taking every dollar from billionaires would knock a 1 year of debt off. The solution is inflation

> The solution is inflation The response is inflation. It would only be a solution if it works, and of all the countries or empires that tried it in the past you'd be hard pressed to find one that succeeded at correcting their economy long term by debasing their own currency.

We have already eaten a ton of inflation, particularly in the first year or so when Biden was President. Trump printed trillions to forestall a collapse during covid. The wisdom of that move is lost on me. I would have preferred the collapse--we might be recovering by now instead of sitting on an even higher precipice awaiting the inevitable fall.
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