Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 580 posts

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

#261

Post by AdrianB1 »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #107
alephnerd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC - Global Capacity Center, basically instead of outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM, a company creates an entire office abroad that owns profit-loss, product roadmap, has executives present, and is a direct part of the company. NCG - New College Grad You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking questions!

So GCC is basically a subsidiary in another country?

You can consider it a branch. It has all sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay taxes on), you can fire them all if you want, especially if it is fairly small and replaceable. And you can sell the dream of promotion space in a large company, but they will almost never get that. And you cut the middleman and keep the money.

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

#262

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mfuzzey wrote: post #260
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper management typically never hears about that and just thinks they are saving money because they are cheap. There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at…

If upper management think that they don't deserve to be upper management.

In many companies there is little flow of real information from the bottom up. Upper management only hears what everyone understands they want to hear.

If the top down message is "this is the direction, make it work", and people further down in the hierarchy understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't working, then he is not going to hear it.

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

#263

Post by fruitworks »

acephal wrote: post #244
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.

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 Americ…

What does renegotiating labor in the face of increased labor supply mean other than just "accept a worse deal"?

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

#264

Post by brendoelfrendo »

justapassenger wrote: post #176
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…

Talented workers get talented pay. But global average of talented pay is much different than average of talented pay in HCOL areas.

Right, but, to be clear, that's not what happened in the case of the original post. They claim they were a senior dev who got replaced by several less effective junior devs.

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

#265

Post by thisisit »

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…

A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead.

With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.

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

#266

Post by Spooky23 »

tuveson wrote: post #111
Spooky23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third generation folks in executive office all over. As a political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as well in many states. There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of…

> There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies. Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of t…

Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and logically. Notice Trump’s big crackdown barely made a dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are on the phone immediately… finance depends on the outsourcers onshore and offshore to function.

India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.

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

#267

Post by alecco »

Arch485 wrote: post #64
random9749832 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: ht…

It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a…

They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.

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

#268

Post by joquarky »

captainkrtek wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

It makes more sense through the lens of advancing the short / medium term interests of corporations under the guise of “helping people”. When we’re all brain rotted and unemployed, how will we spend money on corporations? Its a spiral.

I keep remembering this clip in these discussions:

> I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.

> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.

> One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”

> And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines

- Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars

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

#269

Post by fruitworks »

tamimio wrote: post #205

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 everyon…

there's the PE license

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

#270

Post by FpUser »

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.

>"If software engineering is not special"

Correction - "The US / Canada software" engineering.

Otherwise people from many other countries are just as good while charging way less.

Post reply on HN