I think it's not even AI spending, but just the end of ZIRP.
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
291–300 of 580 posts
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#292Earlier 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.
I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It…
There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy.
15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly.
Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k.
The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness. Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs. Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed. Asinine short sighted city councils will be the deat…
Don’t you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there
If construction had kept up with demand salary wouldn't have skyrocketed and the overall cost of living would be lower.
High salaries that exist just to pay for high house prices hurt everyone.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#294AI 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…
Software development is by nature a boom and bust industry, probably most like film. It’s about creative and isosyncratic contractors picking up projects when they are available.
What most people aspiring for a white collar career probably want is a job in IT - managing technology for business is much more stable than developing novel tech.
If the thought of needing to move or lose a job strikes you as horrible, this is not a likely career path for you.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#295Earlier 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. 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 engine…
Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.
The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#296This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices. Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening: Micros…
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…
> I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs.
They might use it for the next elections, all the white collar jobs are going out of US, they will bring it back if you elect them again.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#297Earlier 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.
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…
Imagine if there was a push to create a professional organization to handle qualification, certifications etc. Like there is for doctors, dentist, accountants and other fields
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#298So, jobs are being replaced by AI spending (not by AI), and AI spending is increasing because of AI, which means AI is replacing the jobs. Did I get wrong?
correct
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#299As 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…
Sorry to hear, as well as to many others.
Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
#300Many are predicting the AI bubble will burst soon. Then we will see massive layoffs.
Massive amounts of people with unsustainable lifestyle will stop consuming stuff. How will the whole capitalist economy continue to function with massive amounts of medium-high income people not having the same income anymore ?
It's complete market failure.
By the time the AI bubble bursts, those that have investments in those companies would have already exited.
Then in 10 years time, they will look back at how they scammed the back off of the layoffs with AI driving the entire problem.