321–330 of 580 posts
This does not reflect my reality. I have worked on half a dozen projects where we would have hired consultants to get the job done but have used coding agents to document, understand, migrate a project, create backend services, dashboards, and other things with budgets ranging from a few thousand euros to 200,000 euros. No consultants hired, nothing spent.
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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…
A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I never visited before... What are they using to determine how many articles I've read? Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never was an overstatement?).
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.
AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending isn't either. It's outsourcing and can be easily confirmed by cross-referencing H1B approval rates with layoffs. If you've been outsourced, ask your representative to support the HIRE Act: - Creates a 25% tax on outsourcing payments - Creates a “Domestic Workforce Fund” for apprenticeships/workforce development. - Prohibits companies from deducting outsourcing payments.
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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.
With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
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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…
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the basic idea of offshoring was invented after the COVID pandemic… But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated the process
By what metrics?
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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.
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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…
The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now gone. I think that has major consequences for the US economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher degrees and certifi…
So the stakes are drastically higher for 18 year olds picking their college majors. It's effectively a life commitment for a specific career path, and there's a lot of anxiety among students because they don't know if the career path they're betting the farm on will still be be viable by the time they graduate. There's also a sense that if you can't manage to find work in the field you majored in within a year or two of graduating, you've fallen off the track and are condemned to DoorDashing forever.
I'm always amazed at how many older people I know (especially 60+) spent their twenties directionless and then started a decent paying career in their 30s, often by simply learning how to do something and getting a job doing it. I'm not sure what policy platform would make that possible again, but accomplishing it would alleviate a ton of the anxiety that young people have today.