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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

#531

Post by trenchpilgrim »

com2kid wrote: post #499
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. I live in a state most SFers consider the middle of nowhere, and my friends and I make more in absolute terms than most SF companies offer (excepting the top tier). 90k is not much more than entry level IT pay here, even new grads make more. Of course, you can't just work on CRUD apps or mobile apps, you have to build up domain knowledge of the business.

Surprising! Whenever recruiters have gotten confused and sent me non-costal job listings the salaries have always been very low (e.g. 140k for a principal level).

Yeah, we make quite a bit more than that even at IC level.

The best jobs are typically not send out for recruiters - people check their networks first, and only go to a recruiter if nobody in their network is available.

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

#532

Post by porridgeraisin »

alephnerd wrote: post #530
porridgeraisin wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job But what about after masters? What are the expectations there? Now of course there is the research path which is publishing well in your masters, working at deepmind or nvidia etc,. But…

> But what about after masters? ... and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high? Not really especially when you factor in international tuition and loan servicing. While it does depend on the program they attended, their past work experience in India, and their ability to land internships, in general I'd say salaries tend to be at the 25th percentile and below of what is shown on…

Interesting. Well, hope my friends get into GAYMAN companies then... whats the Y in there anyway? And is microsoft still excluded from the acronym? lol.

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

#533

Post by alephnerd »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #532
alephnerd wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what about after masters? ... and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high? Not really especially when you factor in international tuition and loan servicing. While it does depend on the program they attended, their past work experience in India, and their ability to land internships, in general I'd say salaries tend to be at the 25th percentile and below of what is shown on…

Interesting. Well, hope my friends get into GAYMAN companies then... whats the Y in there anyway? And is microsoft still excluded from the acronym? lol.

The Y means YC, and yes.

MS has a strict "only-hire-in-India" policy now.

Not to be a downer, but given the current market they are kind of screwed.

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

#534

Post by alephnerd »

davedx wrote: post #516
alephnerd wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea almost no one is making Bay Area level TCs in either location aside from those directly relocated from the Bay or working in HFT at Citadel, Jane Street, or DE Shaw, but you will be able to make Germany or UK level TC (US$50k-110k) with the right track record and experience. Ofc, an equally large cohort will be earning low salaries in the $5k-15k range, but those are largely employed at WITCH or EPAM type compani…

UK (let's say London) level TC is quite a bit higher than 110K US. For real talent you can easily double that. (TC, not cash)

Then you're making the same mistake that Americans are increasingly making as well.

If you aren't top tier talent (Google, Citadel, Bloomberg, or sexy FinTech startup equivalent) we can get by offering £50k-£90k TC for 10-12 YoE in London. This is reflected in the annual TC distribution on levels.fyi [0] - London TC distributions are severely right skewed.

For top talent we are fine matching US salaries 1:1, but most of those roles are basically for people who worked in the US but faced visa issues.

The thing is, most American companies aren't interested in hiring "real talent" at scale in the UK because the salary ends up becoming the same as the US but the pool of candidates is shallower - especially when I can hop over to CEE and open an office in Warsaw, Cluj, or Prague and get significantly higher quality talent at the £50k-£80k range.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...

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

#535

Post by klysm »

evilduck wrote: post #337
klysm wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if they are based in a different country

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

#536

Post by Glyptodon »

echelon wrote: post #94
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.

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…

So I have worked with great offshore folks, but the companies who really go for it seem to very much go with engineers who can barely code their way out of a paper bag just because they're cheap.

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

#537

Post by mbork_pl »

danans wrote: post #191
mbork_pl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?

Very rough estimation: $9000. I'm not sure how much my wife pays - this is paid by the employer and she usually doesn't bother to check. (This is mainly insurance, we seldom use public healthcare.)

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

#538

Post by jollyllama »

pjmlp wrote: post #93

I can tell that editors doing CMS translations, marketing images have certainly been replaced. Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration. Thinking that AI isn't replacing jobs is wishful thinking.

> Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the particulars of this.

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

#539

Post by etruong42 »

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…

I am finding this to be the new "meta" for the software development lifecycle. Given this new reality, it's getting harder and harder to actually invest in ambitious, green-field projects. In this new meta, individual contributors and leadership don't trust each other, leading to a vicious feedback loop of making it harder and harder to jumpstart ambitious projects.

It's hard to commit to a green-field project that is predicated on a level of risk that leaders are hesitant to take on as they would also take on the "counterparty risk" of the expert individual contributors holding them over the barrel to finish the project. The expert individual contributors are likewise hesitant to devote themselves to the task knowing that once leadership considers the "hard bits" to be done, leadership's aversion to risk will try to swap out the expert-individual-contributor roles with much more replaceable roles and ultimately replace the expert individual contributors.

P.S. The parallels between this cycle of mistrust and the modern dating crisis (in the US) does not elude me.

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

#540

Post by pjmlp »

jollyllama wrote: post #538
pjmlp wrote: post #93

I can tell that editors doing CMS translations, marketing images have certainly been replaced. Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration. Thinking that AI isn't replacing jobs is wishful thinking.

> Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic orchestration. I'd be interested in hearing more about the particulars of this.

Look into iPaaS products.

Workfront Fusion, Workato, Boomi, Power Apps, OutSystems

Basically the evolution of BPEL, doing orchestration with any kind of microservices exposed via APIs, which can themselves be exposed via API endpoints.

Now with MCP, tools and agents, some of those diagrams can be further automated.

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