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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

#481

Post by vishnugupta »

throw-qqqqq wrote: post #137
chongli wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again? 3,00,00,000 instead of 30,000,000

I am a European, so may be wrong, but it is my understanding that Indians have intuition around lakhs (100k) instead of thousands/millions. Apparently 100 lakhs is a crore (10M), but I haven’t seen that used so don’t know how prevalent it is - lakh is very commonly used though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

You are correct on all counts.

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

#482

Post by burningChrome »

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…

>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough.

Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.

Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.

Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.

The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.

Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.

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

#483

Post by frm88 »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #383
lordgrenville wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems totally possible that the limit is 0...

Yes, the thought crossed my mind too... But then I tried a private window and it opened, so maybe the other suggestion that the cookies are very long lived is right.

I clean my cookies after every session online and had the same problem, so maybe the limit really is 0 but the dev never actually considered people using private windows? Like you could bypass NYT paywalled by disabling Java Script?

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

#484

Post by closeparen »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #104
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.

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t ju…

If you work in the Bay Area, want to raise kids in a house you own, and don't own one yet, then "can report to a Bay Area office" isn't going to work as your competitive advantage for much longer anyway.

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

#485

Post by burningChrome »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #343
Arch485 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.” Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++…

At least you got to interview them.

One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over.

He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then.

I see not much has changed.

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

#486

Post by throw234234234 »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #109
csullivannet wrote: post #95

If AI really generates the value it claims to cutting jobs is short sighted. If existing human knowledge is commoditized, then we should be able to invest in generating new knowledge, and creating new kinds of products that were not even possible before.

And if AI makes workers more efficient, then businesses not actively hiring more employees are admitting that even with extra resources they have no strategy to grow their business. Like, if one person is effective as ten people, then a business should be able to grow quicker since their operating costs are effectively lower freeing up capital for growth. So either their business is a dead end, the inefficiency is at…

Most businesses have a limit to growth in general (e.g. market size, etc). Doesn't mean they are bad businesses just means they can't grow forever and there is a limit to the demand of that given activity. I argue this applies more so to tech products since they generally are relatively affordable already and for most people aren't price demand constrained. A dead end business w.r.t growth could be a cash positive asset for a very long time depending on what it does and maybe that's OK.

Its why I'm not the biggest believer in "Jevon's Paradox" when it comes to software. Most software projects scale and as such they aren't really cost constrained. Or another way of stating this is "if the idea is good and can make lots of money the cost of dev's isn't a limiting factor" - hence why AI doesn't necessarily increase demand all that much. This is unlike say physical industries where cost can absolutely matter especially if the good is constrained already by affordability.

I think most SWE's know this - they see it with outsourcing as well where cheaper costs don't necessarily mean more software is done; but there is some "hope" that things will be OK.

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

#487

Post by intended »

WalterSear wrote: post #355
ponector wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never an issue to build something. The challenge is to sell your product to cover dev costs at least.

That too, is easier than ever. It's just work, there's no secrets to it.

Nope - this is one of the blind spots people have.

Right now GeAI is making it easier for many people to get started on projects they have.

It’s improving starts of new projects.

GenAI is not creating demand for new projects. Or new novels, new movies, new stories.

People are ending up creating, essentially, for themselves.

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

#488

Post by sharts »

amypetrik8 wrote: post #437
altcognito wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can make more money. And if you don't, then it's crime against the fiduciary.

Exactly, you're on the hook to profit-max for the next quarterly earnings report. If that may negatively impact subsequent quarters, not your problems, that's to be resolved when profit-maxing those quarters

One might argue sacrificing long term gain and stability for short term term profits are indeed a violation of fiduciary responsibility. Why it isn’t being argued I don’t know but we all know delaying gratification tends to result in higher net in the long run.

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

#489

Post by intended »

giantg2 wrote: post #480
lumost wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder at times if tariffs and offshoring protection are necessary at a certain point. Forcing a labor constraint on an economy (within reason) can spur efficiency. Accepting high structural unemployment in the name of the free market seems irrational.

I think we've taken free market to an extreme in a race to the bottom. Tariffs are probably a good thing, but maybe not in the way they have been currently implemented. Almost 15% of the country is on SNAP and we're spending hundreds of billions per month on debt interest. I'm not sure how we come back from this.

The issue is that retraining people is hard.

Frankly the race to the bottom does result in net good for humanity as a whole - but the transition period is not kind to the people who are losing their jobs.

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

#490

Post by whoknowsidont »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #469
alephnerd wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

>static for decades I was chastised for not giving specific examples.

Any examples, really.

>The level of cluelessness on display here is just baffling to me.

I encourage you to give this thread an honest, deep think about why you feel this way. It's certainly not lack of insight from the other side. The word accountability is relevant here.

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