391–400 of 580 posts
There is certainly pressure to spend money on and use AI tools. I know multiple people at different companies whose managers brought up low AI utilization in their reviews. This is, of course, really stupid but here we are.
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> 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…
I wouldn't be that pessimistic. 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…
Exactly. Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr. Which is, after adjusted for inflation to that time... You guessed it: $50.94/hr!
And you're pointing at high quality talent with considerable experience, not some kid out of high school. Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades.
As before, we're only just now starting to notice how far behind we’ve fallen because of things recently becoming exceptionally more expensive.
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…
Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles. If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring…
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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…
I find that some tech workers don't understand economics that well. In general more efficiency for an industry means less wages per unit of output worked across a whole industry. The benefit of "efficiency" usually accrues to customers of a service, not providers. 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 som…
Tbf, a lot of SWEs sneered at other professions getting automated by AI - even on HN.
There isn't much sympathy to be given to SWEs and techies simply because we are paid significantly higher than other white collar roles with comparable or worse working hours like accounting, marketing, other engineering disciplines, dentistry, nursing, and even various subfields of medicine like primary care physicians.
A lot of techies who are complaining on HN need to realize that in reality they are the elite even though they don't think they are.
Why does Jeff in Cary NC deserve a $200K TC working 40 hours and remote first and just a BS in CS when a CPA at PwC makes $120K TC with added debt from a masters in accounting, a Management Consultant at BCG makes $175K TC with added MBA debt, an Biomedical Engineer at Biogen earning around $120K TC with added debt from bio undergrad and grad school, a journalist working for a local newspaper earning $30k-50k with debt from journalism school, and a teacher earns $50K with debt from getting an education credential on top of a bachelors?
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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 i…
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…
Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles. If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring…
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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) 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.
For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands. For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an…
Most people here in the US don't have white collar jobs nor compensation of a software engineer. They work in retail or other blue and pink collar professions.
A Canadian retail worker has much more affordable access to healthcare than their US counterpart.
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I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: ht…
It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a…
https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-d...
https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-i...
etc..
Public press paints picture of the firm laying off due to adoption of AI. Yet, I can assure you without doubt its not because of it but due to continued offshore.
I think we are at the brink of opening another large campus in India, not sure which city. Oh another thing is these full time position in NA were eliminated and replaced with employees from TCS.
My own boss is against it but its coming from higher ups. I have no idea what's driving them. We made billion in net revenues last year and we are actually part of the org that is in 'cash cow' category - upper management literally said this too in our town halls
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For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands. For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an…
> For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands. Most people here in the US don't have white collar jobs nor compensation of a software engineer. They work in retail or other blue and pink collar professions. A Canadian retail worker has much more affordable access to healthcare than their US counterpart.
A SWE isn't in competing for the same jobs as a cashier at London Drugs.