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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

#461

Post by alephnerd »

pizlonator wrote: post #459
mgh95 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes it has. Euro costs 10% more in USD than one year ago. But more or less only the euro. The USD has strengthened or held steady against INR, RMB, CAD, AUD, etc. The euro is strengthening even more, however.

Look at the gold price. Or BTC. By those metrics the dollar has lost a lot of value in the last year

Gold prices are wonky right now because it was Diwali [0] and India did a large GST reform [1] that unlocked consumer capital for gold.

Once Diwali ended a couple weeks ago, Gold prices slumped [2].

The same thing happened with Silver [3].

You used to see similar stuff happen around CNY back when China was growing at double digit speeds [4].

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/10/27/indians-spend-up-to-11-b...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/winners-losers-indias-sw...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/gold-s-re...

[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-18/sold-out-...

[4] - https://ecomod.net/system/files/gold_and_china_ecomod2013.pd...

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

#462

Post by manquer »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #357
alecco wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . Then why are they giving one year of free accounts for developers to the whole country? Remember they have about one million CS graduates every year . Do you see the scale of costs?

For the same reason legacy publishers sell expensive textbooks at 1/10 of the price in India, identical to the USA version save for a stamp that says you can't export them from India.

As a bibliophile, I wish there were true.

The low cost editions are significantly poor quality prints, smaller fonts crappy ligatures, margins line heights- all to squeeze it into less pages, poorer paper, monochrome, laxer quality control -it is not uncommon for few pages to have minor defects .

I appreciate the effort to make something available for that cheap, but they are bad.

It is like business class and economy on a flight. You both go to same destination at the same time sure but the journey is widely different, if you don’t care about the journey it is waste of money yes, but it cannot be denied there is a reason why it is expensive.

In this analogy hard bound would be first class . Mostly unavailable and truly a luxury.

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

#463

Post by questionableans »

mgh95 wrote: post #454
questionableans wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned, this is a privileged position, but I see work as an opportunity to do something I and others find meaningful and useful. I’m paid so that I can afford to focus my time on that work without worrying about money. I seek out employers and co-workers with whom my goals are aligned, and we go our separate ways if that ever ceases to be the case.

If I may ask, is it the production of software generally or specific vertical that makes you feel this way?

It’s definitely specific.

70% Advancing the state of the art in my areas of expertise + 30% Enabling experts in other areas I care about to advance the state of the art by making all the problems related to my expertise just go away

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

#466

Post by mgh95 »

questionableans wrote: post #463
mgh95 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask, is it the production of software generally or specific vertical that makes you feel this way?

It’s definitely specific. 70% Advancing the state of the art in my areas of expertise + 30% Enabling experts in other areas I care about to advance the state of the art by making all the problems related to my expertise just go away

Fair enough, but a huge amount of labor is much more aligned with the skilled but not SOTA work. People don't build payments systems, inventory management systems, or EHRs to advance the state of the art; they build them to provide a service for employment.

I think <5% of labor falls under what you are speaking about.

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

#467

Post by whoknowsidont »

alephnerd wrote: post #451
whoknowsidont wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detail what changed? Because I can't point to anything. And I've been doing this for 4+ decades. A lot of that remote. So you're claiming things radically changed, and if such changes caused a huge shift in the workforce it should be pretty easy to give some examples, yeah? Instead of going "you're full of shit", just answer the question at hand and the one that was given to you multiple times. The fact that it's so…

Not OP but a couple major changes that didn't exist in most companies 20 years ago that reduced friction from an organizational perspective. 1. Gigabit internet - video call quality is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago. 2. Zoom/Google Meets - the attention Zoom gave to UX just wasn't matched by any other precursor. Google Meets is a close second. 3. GSuite/O365 - sharing documents across organizations…

>Gigabit internet - video call quality is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago.

You don't need gigabit internet for good video quality. We solved this with the MPEG-4, specifically H.264.

Most video streaming software still uses H.264 to this day, or some "mimic" of it. This was 15+ years ago btw.

You only need like, maybe 100 Mbps. Most definitely less for normal conferences.

> Zoom/Google Meets - the attention Zoom gave to UX just wasn't matched by any other precursor. Google Meets is a close second.

Opinion based, and you're welcome to have it. But not sure what qualifies as any sort of good evidence or reason for companies moving to other countries for their labor force.

>GSuite/O365 - sharing documents across organizations and being able to search for them successfully org wide has gotten much better now due to tools like Glean

Again, you're welcome to your opinions. Sharing documents in organizations across cities, states, and countries has been pretty mainstay for 30+ years.

And if you want my honest opinion, the tooling has gotten worse.

> Slack - most traditional companies didn't adopt Slack until the pandemic. Before that they were primarily leveraging email

At this point I'm just having trouble understanding why you think these things are fundamentally game changers.

>and DevTooling throughout the 2010s

Like what?

Again, if that's the best examples you could come up with they're not really enough and even worse (in the cases of GSuite/365) they are counter to your point about tooling improvement.

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

#468

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #444
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades. Trying to be charitable, but that is just complete nonsense. I managed an offshore team in 2007, and I managed offshore devs in 2022, and the experiences were world and away different. You're either totally full of shit or just managed teams on some other planet or something.

Detail what changed? Because I can't point to anything. And I've been doing this for 4+ decades. A lot of that remote. So you're claiming things radically changed, and if such changes caused a huge shift in the workforce it should be pretty easy to give some examples, yeah? Instead of going "you're full of shit", just answer the question at hand and the one that was given to you multiple times. The fact that it's so…

This is just laughably ridiculous. OK, I'll bite though, even though I can't believe anyone is actually this willfully blind:

1. As the other commenter stated, gigabit Ethernet is now standard, and tons of people, throughout the world, have bandwidth to their home that can easily support high quality video conferencing. That just didn't exist 15+ years ago.

2. Group video chats on consumer grade devices simply didn't exist. Sure, in the mid 00s we had some group video conferencing, but they nearly always required dedicated facilities - people weren't having zoom meetings with 10 individuals from their laptops.

3. But perhaps most importantly, since the world is now used to doing everything remote, offshore teams are rarely "the odd man out". Right up until around the pandemic, most companies were culturally based around the office, and structures were set up to support in-office collaboration. Now, though, everyone is used to being remote anyway, like my favorite cartoon showing the difference between in-office, remote, and hybrid software devs - except there is no difference, because they're all on Zoom all the time anyway.

I just honestly can't believe that someone who managed remote teams in 2005 thinks it's the same as managing in 2025, and the plethora of advancements in networking and remote conferencing tech easily supports that.

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

#469

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

alephnerd wrote: post #308
whoknowsidont wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're contradicting yourself or getting some wires crossed. >You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco. But this is due to again, vastly different standards of living in different economies. Geo-based pay ranges have always been a thing, but I think it's a bit reasonable to draw the line here. So it's not: >it absolutely is a…

> Companies were already out-sourcing before great video conferencing software or an understanding of how to work with remote teams. And those experiments failed in the 2000s. But in the 2020s with an extended pandemic lockdown over 2-3 years, async work was proven to succeed. I am one of those decisionmakers and the pandemic effect did convince the last stragglers that offshoring by directly managing a subsidiary in…

Your experience exactly matches mine as well.

But some of these comments are just like from another planet. Like a comment I responded to saying "All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades", and then when I responded with disbelief about how anyone could think that remote working tools have been static for decades I was chastised for not giving specific examples.

The level of cluelessness on display here is just baffling to me. There used to be tangible benefits for being located in the same city. If I'm just Zooming with my colleagues anyway, it makes zero difference if they are in the same city or thousands of miles away, as long as there is good timezones overlap.

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

#470

Post by hexbin010 »

exasperaited wrote: post #21

This is absolutely crucial to understand. Because in any country with poor worker protections, the outcome is layoffs regardless. AI succeeds? Layoffs of unneeded roles. AI fails? Layoffs to cut expenditure to make up for the written-off expenditure. In the UK, if AI makes a well-established employee redundant, the employee is entitled to redundancy pay. And if the company fucks up and overspends on chasing a ridicul…

> they can't just fire people without making them formally redundant

They are however pretty well trained in getting people to quit by making their job/life hell, avoiding all redundancy processes and cost

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