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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

#301

Post by cogman10 »

czhu12 wrote: post #276
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…

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.

They do though. My company hires in India and has had a hard time retaining talent there because anyone with mediocre talent can get western salaries by switching to larger companies than our own.

We've lost a decent number of engineers to Google, Facebook, and Amazon in India.

My company wants to pay roughly $50k USD in India per dev and that's just not enough. They've tried to compete by making nicer facilities and better in office benefits (like a cafeteria) but it's just not enough.

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

#302

Post by mrweasel »

qgin wrote: post #245

AI is absolutely replacing jobs though. I personally know multiple people whose companies have downsized departments or eliminated departments completely, offloading the work to fewer people using AI tools.

Here AI is more like a magic solution to stretch the employees you have. I don't know a single person who has been replaced by AI, but plenty of companies and government office hopes to be able to get more work done fast with AI. I doubt it will work.

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

#303

Post by tamimio »

fruitworks wrote: post #269
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

It’s not mandatory, if an employer chose not to care about it, you won’t find any legal issues otherwise in most engineering jobs, that’s not the case in say nursing or legal work. Unless there’s a regulation that requires any engineer should pass certain criteria as seen in other white collar jobs, then it won’t be considered.

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

#304

Post by groundzeros2015 »

com2kid wrote: post #293
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But even if all the construction in the world happens, would you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not a chance. Everyone wants it.

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

#305

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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.

As other commenters have pointed out, this is simply bullshit. Good talent in India and the Philippines earn nowhere near US dev salaries. Unless by "very comparable" you mean 1/3 - 1/2.

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

#306

Post by nandomrumber »

torginus wrote: post #281
dahart wrote: post #13

If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all,…

Tbh AI and layoffs aren't direct consequences of each other imo. Just think back to the 19th century where automation started taking factory worker's jobs. Eventually society learned to deal with automation and even though by pre-industrial standards, 95% of the work that was done by humans to make goods is done by robots and machines, yet there are orders of magnitude more factory workers at least today than were ba…

The benefits to some far off unborn future generations we’ll never know are a poor argument in favour of harms happening to us now.

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

#307

Post by Animats »

From the article: "We have been following the slow growth in revenues for generative AI over the last few years, and the revenues are neither big enough to support the number of layoffs attributed to AI, nor to justify the capital expenditures on AI cloud infrastructure. Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025, while AI revenue—which would be used to pay for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software—will not exceed $30 billion this year."

Are the numbers really that bad?

Google has been claiming that their cost per AI search query has dropped by over an order of magnitude.[1] They're presumably reaping the gains of not cranking up a really smart model on dumb questions.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-th...

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

#308

Post by alephnerd »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #241
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

And those experiments failed in the 2000s.

But in the 2020s with an extended pandemic lockdown over 2-3 years, async work was proven to succeed.

I am one of those decisionmakers and the pandemic effect did convince the last stragglers that offshoring by directly managing a subsidiary in Poland, India, Czechia, Israel, etc with ex-American leadership is good enough.

I warned about this during COVID on HN and was downvoted constantly.

Pretending that the 2000s-era experience can inform decisions we make in the 2020s is completely flawed.

Being in denial of the "brave new world" is only going to do you harm as an IC.

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

#309

Post by tamimio »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #294
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…

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…

Neither software development nor IT work is engineering work and shouldn't be considered one either. I am talking about engineering jobs, jobs that you went to school for 4-5 years in an engineering discipline, not a few weeks bootcamp or made-up program like computer science only to be called an engineer later, diluting the whole industry in the process. So yeah, software development might be boom and bust, engineering is not.

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

#310

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #292
leros wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So much fantasy landing in the comments here.

I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.

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