American devs should support the hire act bill
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
231–240 of 580 posts
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B hiring.
I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'. It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.
> hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.
No it doesn't, not materially anyway. Stats can be misleading if you don't pay attention. A lot of the big corps started hiring H1-B in large numbers long ago but since H1-Bs can't easily switch jobs and tend to suck up to higher-ups, soon their mid-management was occupied by H1-Bs.
Anybody who has tried to find a job in such an environment knows the drill - Indian managers hire only Indians and prefer H1-Bs to keep them docile. Salary isn't a consideration there, but it all starts with "cheap" and is sustained by ethnic loyalty and fear of the outsider.
In smaller companies where hiring is more natural, H1-Bs are still payed less and their inability to switch jobs makes them cheaper still.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#233Earlier 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…
It was going to happen anyways. I was working remote 2-3 days a week before 2020 hit and that was mainly due to how bad my commute was time-wise. It was exhausting. But it's because the team I was working with was all in other cities and countries and so I was driving to an office location just to badge in. I barely even talked to anyone there. It became a terrible job for that reason alone. Much of what made my care…
The people I worked with were pretty distributed before COVID--partially because functions (and geo regions) were distributed anyway--and partly for other reasons. When COVID hit there was basically very little effort to co-locate most teams. Some companies did try to pull people back but in a lot of cases, it was a matter of RTO but that was a good way to do a mass layoff. Many companies didn't want to do that.
I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone long before I semi-retired.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#234As 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.
I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality, and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but that's just about products and platforms, we need a better term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that surprising, but the extent to which investors and even workers are often onboard too is surprising. Vandalism economy? Expertise simply isn't valued for the same reason that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#235wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin but fancy auto complete.
I'd be glad to take any sweet obsolete enterprise HW off them.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs. Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong software sector, but you might expect him to at least do another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost tax revenue, by having de…
Check out the HIRE Act.
Interesting - thanks!
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#237This 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…
This misses the point. The expenditure is financed by stock price increases driven by retail enthusiasm. Meta hasn't spent 1 dollar in AI that it hasn't made in increased mcap. The moment that dries up all the data centers are cancelled. You don't play with the food you eat.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 extr…
There was and is a collective push to show remote work is just as effective as in-office. To the point of absurdity, where there were never any benefits to office work.
It was absolutely a self-own. People not understanding why they were being paid the salaries they were and how replaceable they might be.
It was more or less an entire workforce demanding that their job positions be opened up to global competition thinking there would be no negative long term outcomes from it. They effectively helped offshore their own jobs.
This is just starting - inertia is a thing, and it takes years to stand up competent local engineering teams in various countries. The past few years has simply been laying down the base infrastructure for what is starting to visibly happen today.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#239Earlier 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…
It was going to happen anyways. I was working remote 2-3 days a week before 2020 hit and that was mainly due to how bad my commute was time-wise. It was exhausting. But it's because the team I was working with was all in other cities and countries and so I was driving to an office location just to badge in. I barely even talked to anyone there. It became a terrible job for that reason alone. Much of what made my care…
"Foreman says, 'These jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back'"
-Bruce Springsteen (1984)
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#240Earlier 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.
Like every person I knew who "went remote" was so they could afford a home . Which they weren't able to do next to office with what you all are paying. It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"
By no means universal. I was increasingly remote even before COVID because I did a lot of business and other travel--even if I was never officially fully remote until very late in the game. Never moved from the house I owned through a number of jobs with better and worse commutes. But, then, didn't live in California though did live in what is generally considered a tech center.