211–220 of 279 posts
With Cursor and Copilot, the days of $190k entry-level SWE roles in the US are GONE.
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It makes the competition 25% more productive too.
If there is a finite amount of software to be written in the world, and an increase in productivity of developers than that amount of software is done with less people. Also, if AI allows an non-software person say an marketing person, write a python script to query a few databases. Than the 10 person business data science team might not need a body as they no longer have to deal with the 10% lower level stuff.
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That's right. 90k is the correct value for a mid-level (real, productive) developer across Europe. 40-50k is possible, but for entry-level positions.
Is this the thing where the 99th percentile people somehow think they're the average? I see that a lot on Reddit for some reason.
More specifically:
To be in the top 10% of earners in the USA, you need an annual income of at least $148,812
To be in the top 5% of earners in the USA, you need an annual income of at least $352,773
The median salary in the USA is approximately $59,428 per year
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Dev costs are around 40-45 USD per hour for a lower average in Ukraine. Annual salary would be closer to 90K.
Is that 90k the "lower average"? In Ukraine? I find that very hard to believe. Even here in Czechia that would put you firmly in the top 5 %. I don't think I personally know more than 2 people who make anything like that, and one of them isn't even in IT.
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Easy to tax physical goods, hard to tax "underpaid" service work. Is DeepMind an American company? It's owned by Google, but it was founded in, and is still HQed in, the UK, but has offices worldwide. How much appetite do you recon Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have for America's trillion-dollar-club at this point? Now sure, you could demand any corporations selling in the US, even if not based there, hand over…
Sounds like maybe you’re from Europe? And have a frustration with foreign companies in the US. This further demonstrates that globalism as we’ve seen it with “free” trade is largely coming to a new era with strong headwinds, and it’s not just the US citizenry that wants that. The people that are pro H1B in the US, even given that more than half of the positions hired are foreign-born, are ignoring a stark reality tha…
I think that the internet is incompatible with late 20th century models of national sovereignty. Globalisation itself isn't the problem, it's that services performed across an international border have a very messy relationship with legal obligations, everything from surveillance obligations[0] to minimum wage laws. This will get worse when robots can be tele-operated from a different nation, blurring the division between service and non-service (primary, raw materials; secondary, manufacturing) labour.
I don't think we here in Europe would mind so much, if Big Tech obeyed local laws (even when I disapprove of the law[0], I know I can't pick and choose which laws I follow, every jurisdiction's laws are a package deal). But Big Tech seems to treat European fines for non-compliance as if they were taxes, even though a tax on an import is called a tariff and the US is fine with those.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016, one of two reasons I left the UK
but also https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypt...
and note that Apple disclosing they've received such an order is itself an offence.
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> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead. “Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up worki…
The work force abroad has caught up a lot though. Online learning has made it much easier to improve skills and their English has also improved. And since everyone has become more used to remote work, communication is also much better now. One reason a lot of outsourcing efforts in the early 90s failed was also because the Indian teams weren't properly kept in the loop.
5 years won't change that lol. tata is still going to suck, the difference is now there is TCS in LATAM. same for cap gemini, cognizant, hcl, etc.
I am not sure how things work in US but, living in an Eastern European country, I can say that salaries started growing, almost reaching western european levels, after which many foreign companies closed offices and moved to cheaper countries like India and Pakistan.
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> We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com It certainly feels this way if your only perspective on the tech industry comes from headlines and social media. Step outside of the doomerism whirlwind that is internet headlines and it's a very different story. There are a lot of companies…
At the end of the dotcom boom there were also a lot of companies doing good work.
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> It was clearly valuable from day 1 I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of par…
Never heard of him. But I'm more surprised that someone who saw the Internet in 1998 would say that!
Sears famously laughing at online orders is a great example. They already had the mail over market owned, and already had the distribution, sourcing, and utterly dominant brand recognition in that space. People used to order homes from Sears!
They just needed the online catalog. But the CEO was a psychopath Randian who thought the internet was a fad and now Amazon runs things.
Same with Toy R Us, and Radioshack, which did a lot of mail order.
If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.
That's a big, massive if. I think the more experienced you are, the less net productivity you gain. If you're more senior, is probably very low or even negative. I use ChatGPT every day pretty much, but it has wasted quite a bit of my time. When it does save me time, it's almost just some boilerplate I didn't have to Google or type out. Honestly, I feel like gen AI pleataued a year or more ago. LLMs are just really c…
It takes a bit time to build intuition around the workflow, but when you get going, it seems surprisingly useful. I was a skeptic before as well, btw.