351–360 of 580 posts
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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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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…
Remote work benefits workers too, though: 1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther. 2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live. 3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they…
Efficiency benefits society at large, at the expense of the people being made more efficient. This is just capitalism and the result of price (and also sometimes societal respect) being a function of scarcity of a product/skill.
There's a reason construction unions, doctor's associations, and the like exist - to promote members interests (i.e. predominately money). If you can cartel an industry to produce lower efficiencies; assuming that a disruptor can't break into your market and ruin your party your members will accrue higher salaries and usually given our system more respect from peers in society. Locally I'm hearing "get a trade"; and when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
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I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014. And I worked remotely. $45/hour today is not great given the cost of living.
Jeez--I was making $50/hr in 2004 in one of my first jobs after I finished my PhD and opted out of academia. That pay didn't go that far back then! This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and never gets better, but your costs keep rising, particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left,…
We've failed ourselves too, though. If I was some random person with endless money burning a hole in my pocket, what would I even do with a CS/Math/Computer engineer/Information manager? It is in no way clear how life is improved by working with such a person. Other industries put a lot of effort into marketing what function they serve. Said random person knows exactly when and why they'd want to hire a plumber, electrician, structural engineer, lawyer, accountant, physician, etc. But us...? We've rested on our laurels thinking Google, Microsoft, and Meta will forever want us, putting no effort into expanding our market.
And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.
IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.
And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.
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IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI implementation requires is clearly exponential to complexity of the organization. You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of building a business imaginable. And almost everyone larger t…
It was never an issue to build something. The challenge is to sell your product to cover dev costs at least.
It's just work, there's no secrets to it.
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.
Can you list a few tools that replaced jobs?
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A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training. Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that. Any compute investment is largely local .…
> A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . Then why are they giving one year of free accounts for developers to the whole country? Remember they have about one million CS graduates every year . Do you see the scale of costs?
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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). I think I could easily earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I live in central Europe.)
> 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.
Everytime automation replaced jobs the economies created by this replacement always created new jobs that replaced the previous ones. The USA has always been on the forefront of automating away jobs and it's unemployment rates show that new jobs were always created and that there was no long-term unemployment due to automation. AI won't be any different.
On a side note this is why I find proponents that state people with agency will thrive in the AI world puzzling -> isn't the whole point of "agentic AI" to have "agency"?
With no advantage left (e.g. strength, intelligence, agency, etc) even if new industries come about why not use the AI for those too? Unlike previous industries where new domains needed more "brains" to drive/direct it, we have AI now. AI isn't a tool; it can for example deploy and can make decisions for itself. That's what the obsession with "agentic" is all about - replacing agency which at the moment was the very general domain that you still needed humans for.
This strongly favors the economic means of production remaining that are still scarce (capitalism rewards the scarce, not the efficient). Land, capital, social connections/nepotism, etc. Logically people without these will be less economically and socially valued in general - I hope I'm wrong. The current productive class have the most to lose from AI.
AI IMO breaks meritocracy and skilled based work long term assuming they succeed. Even if not in the next decade, and not the current crop of companies pushing it I'm sure AI will eventually cause this outcome.