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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

#221

Post by nine_k »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #173
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Startups are a different deal. Everyone knows everyone, people are hired for their specific talents, management barely exists, there are no executive types disconnected from the reality in the lower levels of the company, no turf wars of middle management, etc. (This is why I prefer working for startups.)

Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par of the course :(

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

#222

Post by supriyo-biswas »

alecco wrote: post #101
manquer wrote: post #69

Earlier 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?

This is a sales tactic, in the same way that Jetbrains and Microsoft will give out free licenses for students in the hopes that some of them will go on to work for employers who will then buy the product. It also helps convince investors about potential growth and MAU increase.

Same goes for the OpenAI and Anthropic office announcements posted by the GP, these are sales offices with very little tech employment or outsourcing happening.

Re “investments”: these are also not what you think. I remember when Amazon was partnering up with schools in the US to provide “machine learning education” where said education was thinly veiled ads for managed ML services like Sagemaker and Rekognition. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3B investment from Microsoft was primarily free courses and certifications to cultivate a market, as well some annotation work (I know that Amazon has been hiring quite a few people to do this kind of work).

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

#223

Post by irilesscent »

torginus wrote: post #193
oxfordmale wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. Does sound more like correllation than causation. Was there evidence that the Indian devs made the mistakes that led to the hack or was it just the good old 'let's fall back on racism to avoid blame' by management? I still remember the articles where Boeing tried to peg the 737 MAX crashes on Indian engineers who worked for $10…

Its more about social engineering (this was the case for the m&s hack), if you outsource your work, you have less visibility over the people that work for you and it becomes more of a black box. This leads to worse employee awareness in general.

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

#224

Post by Tomcollins4 »

csullivannet wrote: post #95

If 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.

[flagged]

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

#225

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

phil21 wrote: post #204
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts on HN are just in denial or clueless.

> The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.

Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much less desire to outsource software work to India or China (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-based companies.

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

#226

Post by decimalenough »

nine_k wrote: post #209
makingstuffs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no, not really. Top tier Indian cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are expensive and horribly dysfunctional when it comes to pollution, traffic, hygiene, dealing with government bureaucracy, etc. Having money insulates you from some but by no means all of this.

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

#227

Post by pizlonator »

_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.

It's both.

The devaluation of the dollar relative to other currencies will eventually make it profitable for work to move to the US.

I think we're not seeing that yet because there's an imperfect coupling between asset price inflation, consumer price inflation, and exchange rates.

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

#229

Post by torginus »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #196
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…

What “managerial” class are you speaking of? Because most managers in tech do not make much more than the developers they manage.

He's likely talking about strategic not operative management. Not the Team Lead of a dev team, but VPs, department heads, C-levels etc, the kind of people who set quarterly goals and sign contracts.

They're an insular and distinct class unto themselves usually, and there's very little movement (or and very different candidate pool) between devs and them.

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

#230

Post by diamond559 »

submeta wrote: post #132
diamond559 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

So you still had to put in ~3 months of off and on again work, how many hours did it take you over those three months to configure everything yourself? Then figure about how much would you have had to budget out w/o the llm's help. Show me your math. Then of coarse you'd have to follow up w/ the company whether their "llm based bot platform" wasn't just a complete waste of their 200k in the first place for this to matter at all.
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