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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

#271

Post by alephnerd »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #261
bossyTeacher wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay taxes on)

Nope.

Subsidiaries need to pay domestic taxes which in a lot of cases are significantly higher than those in the US. That said, countries like Czechia, Poland, and India help by covering the cost of each employee per head depending on amount spent.

> you can fire them all if you want

Nope.

In my past experience, we need to follow domestic labor laws and they do not budge on hiring or firing in Czechia, Poland, Israel, or India. Ofc, the financial hit of hiring the wrong person is much lower there than in the US, and unlike the US those jurisdictions provide a single window or tribunal dedicated to disputes foreign investors may face.

Same with the UK and the film industry.

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Basically, American jurisdictions became significantly non-responsive to services businesses after COVID and the 2020 election because white collar industries just didn't matter politically speaking (they represented a fraction of hiring and jobs in most competitive seats).

The same kinds of hand-holding support I mentioned above used to be provided by jurisdictions like NC, the Bay Area, NY, TX, etc, but local politicians don't care anymore and local and state governments are severely backlogged and attritted significant amount of personnel who understood business promotion.

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

#272

Post by lanstin »

skywhopper wrote: post #103
dingnuts wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.

Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.

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

#273

Post by lanstin »

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..

A old Twitter thread: “what’s one thing you wish you didn’t know about cloud providers? Answer: eventual consistency means it just sleeps and retries all the way down.”

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

#274

Post by chongli »

hackandthink wrote: post #171
heywoods wrote: post #74

This 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…

"they're cutting jobs because they know AI spending will pay off." They think they know.

They hope they know. They hope they're not in a bubble. It's the same hope that keeps people in a ponzi scheme.

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

#275

Post by debo_ »

echelon wrote: post #94
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.

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…

React Engineer

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

#276

Post by czhu12 »

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…

its kind of hard to imagine that FAANG employees in india and philippines get paid as much as the west when London is a 30-50% cut from the Bay Area.

Just perusing on google for roles at google in hyderabad, I think its significantly lower than the US.

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

#277

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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.

This could not have been said here in 2021 or 2022. It’s disappointing to see how easily opinions change with the zeitgeist.

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

#278

Post by evantbyrne »

alephnerd wrote: post #257
danans wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids) How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses? In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families.

For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands. For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an…

I think you make some solid points, but there are major tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire American developers is for quality. The other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are significant even when well executed.

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

#280

Post by groundzeros2015 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #178
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…

This argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced remote work with unions. All that power and opportunity and they squandered it thinking their bosses and management was on their side. Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have magically protected you these layoffs.

Will the union advocate against H1B and offshoring?
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