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AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

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Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#101

Post by usefulcat »

thewebguyd wrote: post #73
jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

No war but class war. Not sure how long it will take for a critical mass to realize that that we are in a class war, and placing the blame on anything else won't solve the problem. IOW, I agree with you, I also think we are beyond the point where electoral politics can solve it - we have full regulatory capture by the wealthy now. When governments can force striking workers back to work, workers have zero power. What…

You write as though "the wealthy" are a unified group acting in concert. They're not; they're just like everyone else in that regard, acting in their own, mostly short to medium term best interest. Seems like a pretty ordinary tragedy of the commons type of situation.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#102

Post by simianwords »

torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

What you are saying is not intuitive. Software engineers are a cost to software companies. With automation the profits would increase so I’m not sure how it can lead to recession.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#103

Post by tempodox »

xenotux wrote: post #50
jcfrei wrote: post #14

IMHO this is going to be part of a broader trend where advancements in AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had.

> IMHO this is going to be part of a broader trend where advancements in AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had. Then why hasn't it yet? In fact, some lower-wage countries such as China are on the forefront of industrial automation? I think the bottom line is that many Western countries went out of their way to make manufacturing - automated or not - very expensive and time-consumin…

> We might discover that AI capacity is easier to grow in these markets too.

If only because someone else has to build all the nuclear reactors that supply the data centers with electricity. /s

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#104

Post by bcrosby95 »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #85
torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

I've done a vibe coding hobby project where I simply give AI instructions on what I want, using a persona-based approach for the agent to generate or fix the code. It worked out pretty well. Who knows how the software engineering landscape will change in 10 to 20 years? I enjoyed Andrej Karpathy's talk about software in the era of AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ

As an aside, his talk isn't about using AI to write code, it's about using AI instead of code itself.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#105

Post by scarface_74 »

hunglee2 wrote: post #7

In hindsight, remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring, which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation. It is the work we do in in-person collaboration which will keep the moat high against AI disintermediation.

While I agree with remote work to offshoring. I’m not sure about the next step.

I would have been hard pressed to find a decent paying remote work as a fully hands on keyboard developer. My one competitive advantage is that I am in the US and can fly out to a customer’s site and talk to people who control budgets and I’m a better than average English communicator.

In person collobaration though is over rated. I’ve led mid six figure cross organization implementations for the last five years sitting at my desk at home with no pants on using Zoom, a shared Lucid App document and shared Google Docs.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#106

Post by SpaceManNabs »

klodolph wrote: post #87
pluc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except AI support agents are only using content that is already available in support knowledge bases, making the entire exercise futile and redundant. But sure, they're eloquent while wasting your time.

Most of my questions are answerable from the support knowledge base.

If i am calling support, it is probably because I already scoured the resources.

Over the past 3 years of calling support any service or infrastructure (bank, health insurance, doctor, wtv), over like 90% of my requests were things only solvable via customer support or escalation.

I only keep track because I document when I didn't need support into a list of "phone hacks" (like press this sequence of buttons when calling this provider).

Most recently, I went to an urgent care facility a few weekends ago, and they keep submitting claims to the arm, of my insurance, that is officed in a different state instead of my proper state.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#107

Post by simianwords »

PhantomHour wrote: post #95
crazygringo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. The initial years of adopting new tech have no net return because it's investment . The money saved is offset by the cost of setting up the new tech. But then once the processes all get integrated and the cost of buying and building all the tech gets paid off, it turns into profit. Also, some companies adopt new tech better than others. Some d…

> This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. What are you talking about? The return on investment from computers was immediate and extremely identifiable. For crying out loud "computers" are literally named after the people whose work they automated. With Personal Computers the pitch is similarly immediate. It's trivial to point at what labour VisiCalc automated & improved. The gains a…

I highly doubt that the return in investment was seen immediately for personal computers. Do you have any evidence? Can you show me a company that adopted personal computers and immediately increased its profits? I’ll change my mind.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#108

Post by jmyeet »

thewebguyd wrote: post #73
jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

No war but class war. Not sure how long it will take for a critical mass to realize that that we are in a class war, and placing the blame on anything else won't solve the problem. IOW, I agree with you, I also think we are beyond the point where electoral politics can solve it - we have full regulatory capture by the wealthy now. When governments can force striking workers back to work, workers have zero power. What…

It's greed and short-term thinking, We shouldn't be surprised by this because we see companies do it all the time. How many times have you thought an employer or some company in the news is operating on a time horizon no further than the next quarterly results?

To be ultra-wealthy requires you to be a sociopath, to believe the bullshit that you deserve to be wealthy, it's because of how good you are and, more importantly, that any poverty is a personal moral failure.

You see this manifest with the popularity of transhumanism in tech circles. And transhumanism is nothing more than eugenics. Extend this further and you believe that future war and revolution when many people die is actually good because it'll separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

On top of all that, in a world of mobile capital, the ultra-wealthy ultimately believe they can escape the consequences of all this. Switzerland, a Pacific island, space, or, you know, Mars.

The neofeudalistic future the ultra-wealthy desire will be one where they are protected from the consequences of their actions on massive private estate where a handful of people service their needs. Working people will own nothing and live in worker housing. If a few billion of them have to die, so be it.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#109

Post by SpaceManNabs »

grues-dinner wrote: post #36
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Oof

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster.

It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap.

At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#110

Post by graeme »

simianwords wrote: post #102
torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

What you are saying is not intuitive. Software engineers are a cost to software companies. With automation the profits would increase so I’m not sure how it can lead to recession.

They used the word in an irregular way. They meant a decline in software company revenue, not an economic recession.

You might well see more software profits if costs go down but less revenue. Depends on Jevon's paradox really

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