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The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

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Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#91

Without an archive link I think 90% of these comments will be in response to the title only.

I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.

Looking at your karma, I think you can afford it. ;)

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#92

Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry?

The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#93
post #42
post #38

So I want to talk about the Claude Mythos mega-model that had a real marketing push in the last week. Marcus Hutchins (of IWannaCry fame) posted about the economics of this [1]. The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so i…

> $50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. God, I wish I was American sometimes...

Right up until you lose that job and get sick.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#94

Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think. What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard. Now, LLMs can…

I am yet to see this pan out in the enterprise. Enterprises are full of mini kingdoms built by VP+ leaders with the tools they prefer or were sold on. And many of these tools are inherently and sometimes by design are cumbersome, expansive and not onboarding friendly. LLMs haven't breached this domain and this domain empirically is 80% of enterprise software. I am yet to see direct examples of llm agents replacing say 4 engineers out of an existing 8 person team.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#95

Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think. What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard. Now, LLMs can…

While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be. > There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes…

You're correct that it doesn't answer the why.

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#96

Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

It generates economic activity and taxes in the US and suppresses wages.

Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.

The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.

The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#97

AI + Outsourcing is the major reason of tech job bust. But, I think politician won't care as they are here for corporation not for the people.

> politician won't care

they dont care because nobody has a real gut feel affinity for computer programmers or the work, the sort of feeling that is required to animate somebody to action. it's never been a profession with any esteem, and the field never professionalized in the past 60 years, which is a shame, because we now see the outcome.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

honestly i have no idea, in some cases, they are working weekends/are hyper focused on extremely boring, somewhat manual work. some of the systems are complicated and break constantly, so they are almost just oncall fodder for manually fixing a constantly breaking high scale service

Will these kinds of jobs survive Claude code? It sounds like exactly the job that would be easiest to automate.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry? The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they…

We had a tech industry prior to H1Bs before the 90s. What we didn't have was Silicon Valley corporatism that doesn't value American labor nor American education. It's why SV is so gun-ho on charter schools and devaluing American labor.

Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.

Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz

Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.

The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#100

Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

Why would we stop them? Labor is a free market.
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