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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

#331

Post by captainkrtek »

torginus wrote: post #190
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…

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…

> 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

From my time at AWS, and in light of the recent DynamoDB dns race condition bug, this is a line of thinking that is problematic.

There is so much complexity in the inner workings of any one of those services. Many of those services are now composed of many teams, each having turned over completely multiples of times.

Yes there are runbooks and knowledge passed down from each generation, to some extent. But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.

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

#332

Post by downrightmike »

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…

Jaguar/ Rang Rover is owned by Tata, and they created a massive $2B hole in the UK enconomy

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

#333

Post by rs186 »

jdlshore wrote: post #217
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Check out the HIRE Act.

Looks like it's being pushed by a Republican senator without obvious support from the other side.

I'm sure Google, Meta and hundreds of other companies will pay big $$ to make sure nothing comes out of it.

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

#334

Post by lisbbb »

exasperaited wrote: post #21

This is absolutely crucial to understand. Because in any country with poor worker protections, the outcome is layoffs regardless. AI succeeds? Layoffs of unneeded roles. AI fails? Layoffs to cut expenditure to make up for the written-off expenditure. In the UK, if AI makes a well-established employee redundant, the employee is entitled to redundancy pay. And if the company fucks up and overspends on chasing a ridicul…

It already is. The US is currently missing an entire generation of journeyman tech workers because they never got hired in the first place. It's like when Cash for Clunkers got rid of so many used vehicles that it caused market distortions for years.

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

#335

Post by flir »

monero-xmr wrote: post #117
evantbyrne wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London and Toronto give people healthcare. And I was in Michigan.

The vast majority of jobs in America give healthcare. The quality is vastly superior to London and Toronto, although we pay far more (and our medical professionals are upper middle class rather than middle / lower class). However this is a huge hidden portion of salary that most are not aware of, about $25k for a family of 4, which increases labor costs greatly. On sheer metrics of access and quality, America kicks t…

So, uh... how come you die younger?

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

#336

Post by ncphillips »

torginus wrote: post #190
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…

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…

> 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.

Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.

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

#337

Post by evilduck »

klysm wrote: post #325
ultra_nick wrote: post #320

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.

How do you prevent thin wrapper organizations that just contract out “services”?

If we're hypothesizing, then the thin wrapper organizations should or would bear those same taxation and penalty costs when outsourcing and their prices would also be going up.

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

#338

Post by evantbyrne »

alephnerd wrote: post #284
evantbyrne wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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 Not really. No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition. On top of that, the US immigration system i…

> No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.

For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk.

> On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.

A challenge for sure. This and what you go on to describe could certainly shift some junior labor from H1B to remote contract. I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on other American exployment.

> > 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 and having major negative impacts on worker morale

> Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.

Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time.

> Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.

Is that really what is happening? Because based on everything I can see, hiring standards are the highest they have ever been. As we get older, we have a bias towards underestimating the capabilities of younger generations, because we can see them making familiar mistakes in real-time.

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

#340

Post by moffkalast »

torginus wrote: post #214
rcbdev wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This markedly does not apply if the stack is esoteric enough and/or the code is bad enough.

I don't think aspiring to write awful backends in Elixir is the solution to this problem.

Like alcohol, technically it is a solution.
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