371–380 of 580 posts
Why not both? Given all those articles with AI generated images I bet that some artists lost their jobs
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It was an innovation project, with an endowment of 200k. The task was to implement an llm based bot platform in a company with 700+ coworkers. After demoing MVPs, got 40k and access to experts I never needed to use. Deployed open source AWS solution, built customizations, landing pages, and data crawlers entirely solo using AI coding agents over ~3 months while working on other projects. Zero consultants, zero intern…
So you still had to put in ~3 months of off and on again work, how many hours did it take you over those three months to configure everything yourself? Then figure about how much would you have had to budget out w/o the llm's help. Show me your math. Then of coarse you'd have to follow up w/ the company whether their "llm based bot platform" wasn't just a complete waste of their 200k in the first place for this to ma…
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It was never an issue to build something. The challenge is to sell your product to cover dev costs at least.
That too, is easier than ever. It's just work, there's no secrets to it.
If a bunch of additional people start going and building MVPs, what keeps that from becoming even more of a flood, like what you get if you post a job application on LinkedIn nowdays?
I think sales is likely to get harder, not easier, soon.
And to your earlier post, I think the big question is: can individuals get more done on their own now building new things because of less organizational issues compared to incumbents, or because of less product complexity and scope? Is the organization the problem, or is the complexity of stuff built to try to service a thousand different previous sales deals and customers?
This 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…
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 .…
Given that this is presumably all data used for RLHF'ing, I wonder how much of this is responsible for things like LLM "sycophancy" or the issue of "hallucinations". What if the reward-hacking entity isn't the LLM/optimizer but the human annotator in the loop.
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Where do you find these people?
Check the pile of CVs that HR rejected. You will be shocked at the talent in there.
For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted).
The level of resume spam is absolutely staggering. So many applicants to jobs that have no obvious connection to their stated skills & experience, with job application questions filled out by LLMs. I’m not saying they’re all bad people, but all of these people who don’t know what they’re looking for other than an income is really disheartening.
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> 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 natio…
First, sexist, and secondly in 2025 there's no guarantee that you would be able to live in the US long term on a work visa (but it's been this way since the mid-2010s), and if someone really feel the urge to immigrate to the West, then Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany are all easier and (excluding Germany) Anglophone (yes, NL is de facto Anglophone now).
The US just isn't as attractive a location to immigrate to anymore for a large amount of people in white collar roles.
For the cream of the crop who primarily target American BigTech (GAYMAN) or HFTs like Citadel or Jane Street, in India the salary and ESPP grant can afford you household help, a nice condo, and make enough money that you can invest in building generational wealth or angel invest. It was a similar story for Chinese over the past 10-15 years as well.
For Europeans and Canadians, both are extremely turned off to America due to the Trump admin, and at portfolio companies we've seen a significant amount of requests from employees to shift away from the US as a result. Even Israelis increasingly don't target the US anymore because of perceptions and have begun choosing Germany, Czechia, or remaining in Israel.
> I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on American exployment
A lot of senior managers and leadership in tech companies are in the same boat with work visas as I mentioned before. All visas categories go through the same backlog for naturalization in the US - be you a manager, VC, factory worker, or SWE. Heck the creator of PyTorch is himself on one of these visas despite being employed at Meta.
> 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
Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.
> Is that really what is happening
Yes in cybersecurity and a large portion of databases. I even explained why in other HN comments [0]
This is why most of our dealflow is now in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India. Look at recent exists like Wiz ans PingSafe.
Even recent cybersecurity companies that IPOed like Netskope and Rubrik have overwhelmingly hired in Israel or India and with leadership being Israeli or Indian either in origin or nationality.
I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon. 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 t…
I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon. 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 t…
These new tech companies/existing companies were not here for the first wave of offshoring engineers many years ago. basically, the product/service degraded and they brought the product/service back onshore.
It's a cycle that will repeat. Product degrades, there will be public outrage, then they will onshore the product to fix the problems caused from offshoring.
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Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of Americ…
What does renegotiating labor in the face of increased labor supply mean other than just "accept a worse deal"?
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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.
> I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014. And I worked remotely. Same for me, except out of high school, and a decade earlier. That's the sordid tale of the industry. Outside of a handful of FAANG high flyers, pay, in real dollars, has been very steadily decreasing over many decades. But it took high inflation for us to notice. Now we're in a difficult spot because we feel we need to make more to mak…
The market can bear to pay high salaries for the right talent.
If you can show me you have tangible development skills and can think about the product or feature you develop as a business (eg. Can you justify to me in financial terms the net benefit doing a refactor does versus keeping the status quo) you will be fine.
We aren't going to pay you $300k-$400k TC just to be a code monkey. We expect you to be able to help inform actual business decisions and not be a PITA when thinking about the core metrics that matter for a business - NARR, FCF, and COGS.
So, being a developer who is specialized in a business domain (eg. Being a fullstack developer but with a decade of experience working on Cloud Security products) makes it easier for hiring managers to decide whether or not to hire you. And as a former PM, those kinds of Engineers are the best to work with becuase they understand the pitfalls that exist in a subdomain and have opinions and the ability to justify them.
Those who can upskill or show the ability to upskill are also worth their weight in TC.
And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now (Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, NYC). The 5-7 year blip of satellite offices in RTP or Denver or Portland or being 100% WFH in a cabin in Montana is over. The roles at these kinds of offices are the ones that get offshored first.