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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

#241

Post by whoknowsidont »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #218
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…

As someone who over the past couple of years was responsible for some of these hiring decisions, it absolutely is a part of it ... lol. I've worked with absolutely fantastic developers in Argentina, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco. Teams are used to working entirely remotely now, videoconferencin…

I think you're contradicting yourself or getting some wires crossed.

>You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco.

But this is due to again, vastly different standards of living in different economies. Geo-based pay ranges have always been a thing, but I think it's a bit reasonable to draw the line here.

So it's not:

>it absolutely is a part of it ... lol.

Because you're not hiring people from elsewhere because of "well I don't need people HERE anymore." The calculus is the same it ever was, even before COVID.

Companies were already out-sourcing before great video conferencing software or an understanding of how to work with remote teams.

It's an exploitation of different economies, at the expense of the American working class.

It's the same thing, just under a shiny new label designed to absolve the managerial class from said exploitation.

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

#242

Post by diamond559 »

foobar10000 wrote: post #52
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!

In our case - agentic loop optimization of kernels. Works like a dream - after all, you have a perfect python spec (validation), the kernel is small (under 10 kloc), and the entire thing is testable. The trick is to have enough back test data so that things like cache behavior are taken into account. Ended up with different kernel versions for batch-back-test vs real-time work - which was interesting. 5 years ago wou…

How many man hours would it take 10 ppl to do this job?

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

#243

Post by georgemcbay »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #215
torginus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. 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…

You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs are going to fix subtle race conditions… They’ll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away though..

> You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs are going to fix subtle race conditions…

> They’ll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away though..

I don't think torginus's point is that the new devs will find the proper fixes for the code, more that such a hack might be good enough in the eyes of both the company's management and the company's users.

As much as it pains me to recognize this (as a fan of clean, elegant code) not every bit of software needs to be clean and elegant to achieve its intended purpose (which is, at least in the corporate software world being discussed here, to make money).

If you meet the needs of your software's users, you can make a lot of money for a lot of years selling a piece of crap held together with chewing gum and elastic bands (and many companies have).

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

#244

Post by acephal »

dehrmann wrote: post #78
Glyptodon wrote: post #20

As 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.

Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.

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

#246

Post by supriyo-biswas »

moneywoes wrote: post #172
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…

> 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?

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

There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India).

For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level.

[1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/

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

#247

Post by bigbadfeline »

darth_avocado wrote: post #129
terminalshort wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the companies are just going to give you the money if they don't do buybacks?

No but the point I was making was that AI investments at least generate jobs and allow money to flow to people, stock buybacks don’t even do that and are much bigger in magnitude.

> that AI investments at least generate jobs

Nobody said they don't, but these are very few highly payed jobs dwarfed by the number of lost jobs due to capital misallocation. That's the point of the OP which for some reason got lost in discussions of unrelated issues like outsourcing.

Besides, a lot of the AI investments go to Taiwan and other Asian countries where all of the AI hardware is made which makes non-AI hardware more expensive too - a huge cost on the economy. The recent Taiwanese factories in the US don't change that.

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

#248

Post by ipaddr »

cj wrote: post #201
whoknowsidont wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?)

For India they culturally value different skills and roles. They value pair programming and treat great ideas from juniors as a negative. Japan has a different work culture that doesn't fit the open model in the west.

The issue in the EU is local EU companies don't pay as well because they don't have to (little competition). And a culture of not paying high salaries but paying higher taxes.

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

#249

Post by bradlys »

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…

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

I've never heard of typical senior engineers getting paid $400k/yr in those locations.

Outside the US, I've only heard of Zurich being the only comparable location.

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

#250

Post by nickpsecurity »

re title

I literally just said that on Reddit:

"They [big companies] were already laying off lots of people and hoarding around 100 billion in cash. This has nothing to do with AI. The elites have been at that for some time for who knows what reason. If anything, they didn't start spending money until the AI boom.

You could say AI is destroying jobs for a different reason. The leaders of the companies believe in gold rushes more than a steady stream of investments into forming and growing actual businesses. They didn't or don't believe America is worth investing in. They're simply about extraction."

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