[HN Gopher] AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
Author : felineflock
Score : 519 points
Date : 2025-11-09 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off
| for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin
| but fancy auto complete.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| Imagine if you spent those years building something else.
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| Yes, like renewable energy infrastructure (which China does,
| and would be highly useful anyway in case generative AI does
| live up to its promise).
|
| Even if generative AI lives up to its hype, with current US
| administration there's no way America is going to lead the
| race for long. There's just not enough energy available, when
| those in power oppose developing many of the energy projects
| that make most economical sense.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Probably could be repurposed for something else though?
| n3t wrote:
| You can already buy cheap but powerful old servers. But newer
| hardware tends to be more power efficient. So, depending on
| time horizon you consider, it might be cheaper to buy newer
| hardware.
|
| Assuming that GPUs power efficiency will increase, the same
| will be true about them.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| what else could possibly use that much compute? especially
| somewhat specialized compute, not suited for general purpose
| compute?
| throw-52 wrote:
| The one truly hopeful aspect of a bubble-burst scenario is
| that extra capacity always finds a use-case, and in this case
| practically any other use-case would be both less harmful and
| more real.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Mining crypto if we're unfortunate.
| tryauuum wrote:
| interesting questions, how will this unroll
|
| right now I see even old GPUs like V100 are still popular.
| Maybe the old GPUs will shift to the countries with cheap
| electricity?
| xandrius wrote:
| I'd be glad to take any sweet obsolete enterprise HW off them.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| A little bit off topic: but I couldn't even start to read the
| article because "I reached my article limit" out of I site I
| never visited before... What are they using to determine how many
| articles I've read?
|
| Opening in a private window solved the issue, however I'm pretty
| sure I don't regularly read anything on this site (maybe never
| was an overstatement?).
| finghin wrote:
| Exact same experience here.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Seems totally possible that the limit is 0...
| system2 wrote:
| Maybe their cookies are very long-term and you visited this
| site 6 months ago?
| goalieca wrote:
| I can't read the article but that won't stop me from commenting..
|
| This year alone something like 400B was spent on investing in
| chips, datacenters, electricity buildouts. That's 400B that could
| have otherwise been invested in people.
|
| While i don't doubt that people will find a few solid business
| cases for LLMs, i am on team-bubble. I don't think this
| investment will add 400B worth of value and I very much doubt
| that this 400B is any good for future growth or long-term
| aspirations of AGI. Investing 400B into people and (tech)
| manufacturing would be a solid long-term bet with benefits.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Bah, all of that is still employing people. Companies have
| completed almost $1T of stock buybacks this year. Since 2018,
| with the exception of 2020, that number has been between $800B
| and $1T every single year. And that number has been more than
| $500B since the 2008 recession. AI spend is bad but it's not
| even close to how much stock buybacks have ruined the employee
| wages and employment prospects.
| terminalshort wrote:
| You think the companies are just going to give you the money
| if they don't do buybacks?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| No but the point I was making was that AI investments at
| least generate jobs and allow money to flow to people,
| stock buybacks don't even do that and are much bigger in
| magnitude.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > that AI investments at least generate jobs
|
| Nobody said they don't, but these are very few highly
| payed jobs dwarfed by the number of lost jobs due to
| capital misallocation. That's the point of the OP which
| for some reason got lost in discussions of unrelated
| issues like outsourcing.
|
| Besides, a lot of the AI investments go to Taiwan and
| other Asian countries where all of the AI hardware is
| made which makes non-AI hardware more expensive too - a
| huge cost on the economy. The recent Taiwanese factories
| in the US don't change that.
| danny_codes wrote:
| It's mildly infuriating that we keep cutting corporate tax
| rates and using debt to finance public spending instead. That
| trillion dollars of buybacks would balance the budget with
| likely minimal impact on GDP (I mean clearly these companies
| don't need the money).
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| Imagine if 10% of that money had been spent just training young
| people, or on a new cohort of PhDs. Imagine what benefits we
| would have reaped in a decade's time.
| mrweasel wrote:
| With $400B you should be able to do pretty much anything you
| set your mind on. Want to do to Mars, not a problem. End
| world hunger, $400B will do that in about ten years. You can
| do ANYTHING with $400B, yet OpenAI want's to sell erotic
| chats and show you ads?
|
| I'm not saying that LLMs and the current AIs aren't useful,
| but they aren't worth even close to $400B. Some of the
| progress, especially in the medical field, is amazing, but
| the spending is completely out of proportion with the gains.
| It only works because right now people like Sam Altman has
| sold people with money on the idea and now they have to
| continue to peddle their sneak oil, hoping that the money
| won't dry up.
| lucaslazarus wrote:
| Matter of time until markets reckon with AI investment crowding
| out non-AI investment (cf. the massive oversubscription of Meta's
| latest bond offering). Must suck to be a small-cap firm squeezed
| by tariffs raising costs, unemployment lowering demand, and AI
| investment raising your own non-AI cost of borrowing.
| throwarchive wrote:
| https://archive.is/9sdT5
| pants2 wrote:
| That's an interesting point that I haven't considered before:
| that the narrative of AI replacing jobs plus the widespread
| cheating in school using LLMs is making students less engaged and
| new graduates less employable, becoming a self-fulfilling
| prophecy for AI.
| philipov wrote:
| They told us TV would rot our brains, but AI actually does.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Or maybe TV also does and the baseline has already shifted
| into the state of that rot.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| No one gets fired for tuning out of temporary tuning out of his
| smartphone or doing chores the classic way I guess. ;)
|
| I use mobile services timeboxed and in conjunction with
| blockers for certain services. I also went back to use old-
| school pencils and paper for work whenever possible. It is
| helpful - and fun.
|
| Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained
| attention, mental health, and subjective well-being:
| https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/80160...
|
| Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces
| Available Cognitive Capacity:
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Surely this would be indicated by a glut of unfilled job
| postings.
| a24j wrote:
| Here: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/02/nx-s1-5591302/ghost-
| jobs-are-...
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I don't see the relation. A "ghost job posting" is not
| evidence of recent graduates failing to meet the
| requirements of the past; it is a job posting an employer
| has no intention of filling to begin with.
| a24j wrote:
| You said:
|
| > Surely this would be indicated by a glut of unfilled
| job postings.
|
| I posted a link about Ghost jobs. Then, you said:
|
| >[...]it is a job posting an employer has no intention of
| filling to begin with.
|
| GP' comment speaks to recent graduates feeling less
| engaged. Whether it's because they fail to meet the
| requirements, or the requirements are literally fake
| doesn't matter. AI isn't used simply to cheat on
| coursework, but also to erect a de facto glass ceiling
| viz fake jobs with fake requirements, engagement suffers.
| simonw wrote:
| This is one of the aspects of AI ethics that I don't think gets
| nearly enough attention: the general psychological effect that
| information about AI has on people, regardless of their
| interactions with the tools themselves.
|
| Students getting lazy, or dropping out of subjects entirely
| because they don't think they have a future in them.
|
| Depression and a general feeling of despair. I see this in
| programming communities quite a bit - people who see LLMs as an
| existential threat to their careers and that they have wasted
| their lives getting good at something which is now being
| devalued.
|
| "ChatGPT psychosis" - where people talk to LLMs and have
| unhealthy thought patterns reinforced by them to disastrous
| ends - gets a ton of coverage. But what about these milder but
| still meaningful effects where the very existence of AI
| disrupts people's future plans and self-worth even if they're
| not using it at all?
| boulos wrote:
| Btw, the recent Conversations with Tyler had a few minutes on
| this topic with Sam:
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-
| tyl...
|
| It was a bit towards the end, I think.
| azemetre wrote:
| Why should I listen to the snake oil peddler? Finding real
| neutral critiques isn't hard.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| It makes more sense through the lens of advancing the short /
| medium term interests of corporations under the guise of
| "helping people".
|
| When we're all brain rotted and unemployed, how will we spend
| money on corporations? Its a spiral.
| joquarky wrote:
| I keep remembering this clip in these discussions:
|
| > I went through this Ford engine plant about three years
| ago, when they first opened it.
|
| > There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there
| you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard,
| just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on,
| which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
|
| > One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful
| tone in his voice said to me, "How are you going to collect
| union dues from all these machines?"
|
| > And I replied, "You know, that is not what's bothering
| me. I'm troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles
| to these machines
|
| - Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
| dehrmann wrote:
| There are two ways of reaching AGI: smarter AI and dumber
| humans.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| In the span of like 2 yrs?
| BenGosub wrote:
| It's like when we forgot all things that we can google, but on
| a much, much greater scale. For example, multiplication by
| heart. I think oral, in person examination should be used with
| students whenever possible, in order to deal with cheating.
|
| If others are slacking, it's an opportunity to level up and
| stand out. Also, IMO there are market forces currently
| reshaping the jobs landscape, it's not only AI, I don't even
| think AI is the main driver.
| thunderbong wrote:
| https://archive.is/9sdT5
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I think the article is missing two points: if the latest layoffs
| aren't related to AI, then this doesn't mean AI won't have or has
| an impact on head count.
|
| And investment and experiments by definition include the risk of
| failing. In almost everything lies a survivorship bias and no one
| talks about the 100+ car makers that went into goldrush mode 100+
| years ago. This is life. Netflix vs Blockbuster - already
| forgotten?
|
| Also the "fail rate" - so what part is failing and why? What's
| with the 5%? If we have a look at exponential functions this
| might be a really good deal, if the 5% can account for the
| losses. After all, benefits compound over time.
|
| I witnessed first hand in FAANG some quota hires and I believe
| that now that no one gets paid for contrived and artificial
| business advantages, we are back to a more merits based
| evaluation of workers.
|
| But AI should not be written off as fancy something with no
| impact. That's the wrong take. Whether it will be a springboard
| to new jobs that compensate for losses or replacements - I am not
| yet sure, but tent to be in the former group. ML engineers take
| care of ML - something new that takes care of something new.
|
| We will see.
| dahart wrote:
| If Amazon's layoffs aren't AI driven, and AWS is making more
| money than it's spending on AI infra... how is Amazon evidence of
| AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but
| this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like
| juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very
| popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at "AI
| washing" without doing any digging at all, and cites the MIT
| study without noting that it's getting a ton of legitimate
| criticism. Is AI really a sideshow or an excuse for layoffs that
| big companies were hoping to do anyway, is it taking the blame
| for low confidence in the economy?
|
| https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/why-we-dont-believe-m...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost...
| diamond559 wrote:
| AWS is making more money, they are not making money running
| llms. The companies didn't want to reveal internal procedures
| and exact profit/loss statements, is that surprising to this
| article writer? Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy than this
| stonk pumper site.
| dahart wrote:
| > Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy that this stock pumper
| site.
|
| Oh I totally agree with you, this was just the first thing
| that came up in a Google search. The criticism of MIT's study
| has been going around widely, this site isn't the only one
| saying that this study lacks objective metrics.
| gravypod wrote:
| I don't necessarily believe this is the best explanation but:
| We know the economy is doing pretty poorly and tech companies
| are consolidating. Amazon is losing it's two main drivers of
| revenue: Irresponsible startups with huge AWS spend and no
| pressure to optimize their stack and consumers buying treats
| online. Regardless if people are spending on AI, the only thing
| businesses are investing on is AI and analysts at AWS are
| likely signaling that many AI companies are not seeing a large
| ROI and model developers will likely build their own versions
| of successful products (Claude Code). AWS doesn't want to scale
| up it's GPU fleet and be left holding the hardware bag. Amazon
| can't juice numbers for consumer purchases since the rest of
| the economy is contracting, most people are losing jobs, etc.
| So the easiest way to for Amazon to juice their metrics is to
| offshore office work that can be done anywhere. They can claim
| they are using AI - but from conversations with friends who are
| working at Amazon this does not sound very realistic - and ride
| the AI bubble with no liabilities.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Large companies add and remove jobs all the time. It's just the
| the latter gets much more media coverage. Jobs are always being
| created and destroyed, for all sorts of reasons.
| torginus wrote:
| Tbh AI and layoffs aren't direct consequences of each other
| imo. Just think back to the 19th century where automation
| started taking factory worker's jobs. Eventually society
| learned to deal with automation and even though by pre-
| industrial standards, 95% of the work that was done by humans
| to make goods is done by robots and machines, yet there are
| orders of magnitude more factory workers at least today than
| were back then.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| The benefits to some far off unborn future generations we'll
| never know are a poor argument in favour of harms happening
| to us now.
| submeta wrote:
| This does not reflect my reality. I have worked on half a dozen
| projects where we would have hired consultants to get the job
| done but have used coding agents to document, understand, migrate
| a project, create backend services, dashboards, and other things
| with budgets ranging from a few thousand euros to 200,000 euros.
| No consultants hired, nothing spent.
| diamond559 wrote:
| What job did the llm do that was worth 200k Euro to you? Be
| extremely specific w/ hours worked etc bc we all totally
| believe you!
| foobar10000 wrote:
| In our case - agentic loop optimization of kernels. Works
| like a dream - after all, you have a perfect python spec
| (validation), the kernel is small (under 10 kloc), and the
| entire thing is testable. The trick is to have enough back
| test data so that things like cache behavior are taken into
| account. Ended up with different kernel versions for batch-
| back-test vs real-time work - which was interesting. 5 years
| ago would have hired about 10 ppl for the job - now 2.
| diamond559 wrote:
| How many man hours would it take 10 ppl to do this job?
| submeta wrote:
| It was an innovation project, with an endowment of 200k. The
| task was to implement an llm based bot platform in a company
| with 700+ coworkers. After demoing MVPs, got 40k and access
| to experts I never needed to use. Deployed open source AWS
| solution, built customizations, landing pages, and data
| crawlers entirely solo using AI coding agents over ~3 months
| while working on other projects. Zero consultants, zero
| internal help. Would have easily burned the full 200k the
| traditional way.
| diamond559 wrote:
| So you still had to put in ~3 months of off and on again
| work, how many hours did it take you over those three
| months to configure everything yourself? Then figure about
| how much would you have had to budget out w/o the llm's
| help. Show me your math. Then of coarse you'd have to
| follow up w/ the company whether their "llm based bot
| platform" wasn't just a complete waste of their 200k in the
| first place for this to matter at all.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| Same - the leverage in using this tech is unbelievable for
| those who have a lot of experience. Folks are in denial.
| croes wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Given all those articles with AI generated images I bet that some
| artists lost their jobs
| zer00eyz wrote:
| This should shock no one.
|
| Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the
| smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You
| could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave
| them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of
| cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only
| got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home,
| with a stimulus check and nothing to do. Rather than a flurry of
| new software you got mass hiring.
|
| But now we are in a capital intensive hardware cycle. Where in
| order to compete you need to have lots of $$$$ as well as
| software know how. It does not matter that there are smart people
| out there, without hefty backing they wont get very far.
|
| I suspect that software is about to enter its "punk" era. We have
| software for small businesses that will help with accounting, HR,
| customer service, and cloud providers are starting to see some
| interesting competition. Much like the old punk poster showing
| you 3 chords and telling you to start a band it is entirely
| possible to find three friends and start a business that makes
| 1-10 mill a year with little effort and lower costs. The moment
| you stop thinking "unicorn" and start thinking "sustainable" the
| economics shift radically.
| gregates wrote:
| Not to mention that there's already a small market for software
| products that work just like existing products that were once
| good, only without all the AI getting in your way at every
| turn. You're just not going to be making huge enterprise sales
| with such a product (in 2025).
| vatsachak wrote:
| Yeah with ChatGPT anyone with enough agency and programming
| chops can design tailored solutions for local businesses.
|
| I don't think that ChatGPT coding is valuable but rather it's
| ability to tutor people and guide them towards idiomatic
| patterns.
| EPWN3D wrote:
| I think you're on to something, but interest rates probably
| have to come down a bit more for it to really have legs. We
| definitely need a response to enshittification though.
| hobs wrote:
| The effort in those businesses was never coding, it was always
| connecting with and selling customers, understanding them, and
| supporting them as time went on. AI can help with some of that
| but generally the connections and network effects have outsized
| contributions in the smaller niches.
| gregates wrote:
| Funny to me how many of the replies to this comment are
| assuming you mean all these "punk" startups will be possible
| because of AI, when your actual comment says nothing of the
| sort.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| AI is another enabler, but by no means the primary one at
| all.
|
| 340 millon Americans. Reach 10k of them at 10 bucks a month
| and you have a business that pays for a couple people to live
| comfortably.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| 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 retaining senior level talent,
| to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was
| materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it
| was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks
| and less experienced onshore ones.)
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_t...
|
| https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/
| soneca wrote:
| I was told that the main reason the "Who is hiring?" thread
| (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote
| positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US
| now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal
| incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is
| much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the
| US.
|
| Doesn't it affect big tech companies? Only startups?
|
| I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much
| more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.
| diamond559 wrote:
| Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the
| capacity for long term memory formation.
| random9749832 wrote:
| I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit
| analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in
| far more places than India but somehow it almost always is
| India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn
| profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian
| universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it
| is nothing.
|
| Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech:
| https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-
| looks-t... Wtf...
| Arch485 wrote:
| 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 junior dev
| salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's
| just stonks.
| random9749832 wrote:
| Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/rec
| ruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...
| alecco wrote:
| They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers
| are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a
| lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often
| than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake).
| The old IBM playbook on steroids.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| >"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++
| experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not
| exaggerating.
|
| Whereas our team's college intern turned junior dev has
| consistently delivered increasingly valuable
| contributions and doesn't lie to us.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers
| speak for themselves.
|
| Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about
| SW developers per country.
|
| https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-
| developer...
|
| When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you're
| obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a
| factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries
| like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries.
| Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues.
|
| That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only
| alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don't
| even have half the number of SW developers as India.
|
| You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines
| and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW
| developers present in India.
|
| Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in
| India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to
| as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to
| migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is
| sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer
| market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different
| countries across 4 continents.
| random9749832 wrote:
| Here you go, h1b hires still get paid American salaries
| so that throws the whole 'they get hired because they are
| cheap' argument out of the window:
| https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-
| tru...
|
| >70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for
| itself.
|
| Also, when you start giving _a lot_ of tech jobs to
| people from one specific country, then the github
| developer numbers will naturally reflect that.
| zbentley wrote:
| Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B
| hiring.
| random9749832 wrote:
| I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am
| responding that the bias in hiring towards this one
| country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.
|
| It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk
| about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you
| look at h1b numbers.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a commonly made argument, but it's innumerate. Low
| h1b salaries lower local salaries. The reason you hire
| h1b is because they're cheap, and then the only locals
| you hire are the ones that will work at the price of
| h1bs.
|
| Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you
| get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is
| 'cheap'.
|
| No it doesn't, not materially anyway. Stats can be
| misleading if you don't pay attention. A lot of the big
| corps started hiring H1-B in large numbers long ago but
| since H1-Bs can't easily switch jobs and tend to suck up
| to higher-ups, soon their mid-management was occupied by
| H1-Bs.
|
| Anybody who has tried to find a job in such an
| environment knows the drill - Indian managers hire only
| Indians and prefer H1-Bs to keep them docile. Salary
| isn't a consideration there, but it all starts with
| "cheap" and is sustained by ethnic loyalty and fear of
| the outsider.
|
| In smaller companies where hiring is more natural, H1-Bs
| are still payed less and their inability to switch jobs
| makes them cheaper still.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third
| generation folks in executive office all over. As a
| political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as
| well in many states.
|
| There's a lot of opportunities for personal networks,
| nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to
| figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your
| sibling as a kickback?) There's a much smaller network of
| people with relationships to Eastern European or other
| companies.
| tuveson wrote:
| > There's a much smaller network of people with
| relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
|
| Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a
| pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with
| most developed countries, and not engaged in any major
| wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for
| outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in
| 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to...
| India!
| lazide wrote:
| Yup, India is geopolitically right in the middle - and
| enjoying it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and
| logically. Notice Trump's big crackdown barely made a
| dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are
| on the phone immediately... finance depends on the
| outsourcers onshore and offshore to function.
|
| India's long term positioning of neutrality and strategy
| with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.
| alephnerd wrote:
| GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and
| Costa Rica as well.
|
| Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten
| extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during
| COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to
| operate when entire teams are communicating async.
|
| If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are
| essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't
| sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills
| deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain
| degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a
| short term bid to compete against bootcamps.
|
| If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance
| comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now
| starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.
| alecco wrote:
| Are they investing tens of billions in new offices in those
| non-Indian countries?
|
| My other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yes. (Still in process of generating the list)
|
| Poland [0][8]
|
| Ireland [1][2]
|
| Czechia [3][4]
|
| Canada [5][6]
|
| Turkiye [7]
|
| The expansion of Indian offices is a result of the
| reverse brain drain that accelerated during the early
| COVID layoffs along with the EB1/2 backlogs - a number of
| Staff and above Engineers, EMs and above, and Sr PMs and
| above who were on work visas were either cut or given the
| option to relocate to India and start a hub office.
|
| A similar trend happened in other countries, but India
| being so large means they get overshadowed.
|
| [0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-
| invests-billions...
|
| [1] - https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-
| releases/2023-6-20-amd...
|
| [2] - https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-
| events/department-news...
|
| [3] - https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-
| announces-major...
|
| [4] - https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-
| announcement...
|
| [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-
| tech-hub-...
|
| [6] - https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-
| toronto-offic...
|
| [7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-
| invest-200-ml...
|
| [8] - https://news.microsoft.com/pl-
| pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announ...
| alecco wrote:
| [0] no concrete number, and wording implies _intent_ in
| the order of 1 billion total
|
| [1] only $135 Million
|
| [2] only 1,300 new employees (over 6,000 current);
| meanwhile "Apple India leases [...] likely to be one of
| the largest single-tenant office leases in [Bengaluru]"
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-
| news/app...
|
| [3] Never even heard of Cato Networks, and no figures. So
| irrelevant.
|
| [4] onsemi manufacturing $2bn, not relevant as this is
| manufacturing numbers (Apple India is expanding multiple
| times that)
|
| [5] No numbers, 2,934 employees. Mentions increment 20%
| of local market and an acquisition. Not relevant.
|
| [6] Amazon plans 8,500 employees in the two [Canadian]
| cities. Meanwhile "Amazon to invest $233M to strengthen
| India operations network"
| https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/operations/amazon-to-
| invest-... (OTOH: they are laying off 800-1000 in India,
| out of over 15,000 desk employees just in Hyderabad)
|
| [7] Uber to invest $200 mln in Turkey. Peanuts compared
| to the billions in my links.
|
| From your submissions it seems like you are Indian or
| something.
| gedy wrote:
| > but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack
| in the US,
|
| You mean cost of living and inflation has devalued the
| dollar.
| alephnerd wrote:
| London has a similar CoL as San Francisco yet tech
| salaries are around 33%-50% what are offered in the Bay.
| Same with Toronto.
|
| On top of that, both the British and Canadian governments
| give some degree of tax subsidy and regulatory support,
| though not to the degree that India, Israel, Poland,
| Czechia, or Romania provide.
|
| Why should I pay Jeff from NCSU a US$175K TC in RTP when
| I can get Jane who chose to return to Toronto after
| living in the US working for large companies throughout
| her 20s?
|
| A lot of techies on HN really underestimate the amount of
| reverse brain drain that happened during and after COVID.
| The COVID layoffs in early-mid 2020 primarily targeted
| those on some kind of work visa, and a number of those
| laid off were given the option to take a pay cut but also
| open a node in their home country.
|
| Edit: can't reply so replying here
|
| > I hear this, but the fact is a 70% pay cut in the Bay
| Area would simply not be workable at all
|
| This is why we began opening offices in RTP, Denver,
| Chicago, NYC, etc in the 2017-22 period because we could
| pay closer to London or Toronto salaries back then in
| those offices _and_ we had state level support.
|
| All of that went to the wayside after COVID because a
| large portion of our workforce reverse braindrained, and
| someone in RTP demanding WFH and a Bay Area salary in a
| metro where CoL is comparable to Fresno and where we had
| to spend significant amounts of capital in commercial
| real estate to unlock tax benefits is ridiculous.
|
| We are fine paying high salaries and TC, but it needs to
| be justified by actually high tier talent. Think the
| Netflix model.
| gedy wrote:
| I hear this, but the fact is a 70% pay cut in the Bay
| Area would simply not be workable at all. You don't just
| cut out Starbucks and Amazon junk.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Yeah I'm surprised to hear London has a similar cost of
| living to San Fransisco. I wouldn't expect someone
| working in tech in SFO today to be able to stay there at
| 33-50% of their current salary.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| All Western countries are devaluing their currency. No
| other way to reduce the debt. Cutting benefits is
| political suicide. Taking every dollar from billionaires
| would knock a 1 year of debt off. The solution is
| inflation
| _heimdall wrote:
| > The solution is inflation
|
| The response is inflation. It would only be a solution if
| it works, and of all the countries or empires that tried
| it in the past you'd be hard pressed to find one that
| succeeded at correcting their economy long term by
| debasing their own currency.
| lisbbb wrote:
| We have already eaten a ton of inflation, particularly in
| the first year or so when Biden was President. Trump
| printed trillions to forestall a collapse during covid.
| The wisdom of that move is lost on me. I would have
| preferred the collapse--we might be recovering by now
| instead of sitting on an even higher precipice awaiting
| the inevitable fall.
| pizlonator wrote:
| It's both.
|
| The devaluation of the dollar relative to other
| currencies will eventually make it profitable for work to
| move to the US.
|
| I think we're not seeing that yet because there's an
| imperfect coupling between asset price inflation,
| consumer price inflation, and exchange rates.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014.
| And I worked remotely. $45/hour today is not great given
| the cost of living.
| alephnerd wrote:
| London and Toronto have a similar CoL as the Bay Area and
| $45/hr is a mid-career tech salaries in both Greater
| London and GTA.
|
| Edit: can't reply but every single white collar job
| provides an employer healthcare plan that is equally as
| competitive as the public healthcare plans in Canada and
| the UK.
|
| And especially if you were being paid $50/hr as a new
| grad in 2014.
|
| Edit 2:
|
| > And I was in Michigan.
|
| All the more reason I would have pushed back severely.
| It's easier to find talent at scale in London or GTA -
| metros there have a population larger than the entire
| state of MI, and with a breadth of options beyond UMich
| Ann-Arbor.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| London and Toronto give people healthcare. And I was in
| Michigan.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The vast majority of jobs in America give healthcare. The
| quality is vastly superior to London and Toronto,
| although we pay far more (and our medical professionals
| are upper middle class rather than middle / lower class).
| However this is a huge hidden portion of salary that most
| are not aware of, about $25k for a family of 4, which
| increases labor costs greatly.
|
| On sheer metrics of access and quality, America kicks the
| shit out of Europe and Canada
| flir wrote:
| So, uh... how come you die younger?
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Opioid epidemic skews the stats.
|
| The OP's point is why the wealthy in your country comes
| to the US for healthcare
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I hope we continue getting the shit kicked out of us, if
| victory looks like medical bankrupcy, and insulin
| rationing.
| csullivannet wrote:
| $45/hr is low for GTA. I was making about that in Toronto
| in 2017 with two years experience, one year vocational
| degree, and a bachelor's in a completely unrelated field.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > every single white collar job provides an employer
| healthcare plan that
|
| The key word there is _employer_. Contractors often don
| 't get health insurance, and contract jobs are not
| uncommon in the US.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with
| almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry
| too much about spending (with a wife earning about a
| third of my salary and two kids). I think I could easily
| earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich
| but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't
| do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I
| live in central Europe.)
| danans wrote:
| > FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with
| almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry
| too much about spending (with a wife earning about a
| third of my salary and two kids)
|
| How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health
| insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?
|
| In the US that expense is very high, and is a major
| source of worry for working families.
| alephnerd wrote:
| For most _white collar jobs like tech_ here in the US,
| your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn 't play
| a role in how we decide salary bands.
|
| For a family of four, the average health plan is around
| $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around
| $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE
| salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in
| Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an
| American ends up earning _significantly more_ after
| healthcare costs and insurance.
|
| The issue is salary expectations at the lower performance
| band haven't kept up with what is expected at that salary
| band.
|
| > In the US that expense is very high, and is a major
| source of worry for working families
|
| When benchmarked against similar peer cities in Canada
| [5] or the UK [6], CoL is roughly at par yet salaries are
| significantly higher in the US, especially when comparing
| peer tech markets like SF [7] versus London [8].
|
| This is the crux of the issue - demanding 100% WFH well
| past the end of COVID made it hard for us to justify
| domestic hiring when
|
| 1. Async was successfully proven to not impact business
| operation
|
| 2. A reverse brain drain of all nationalities in the US
| during COVID meant it was easier for employers to work
| with them to open a hub office or GCC abroad
|
| 3. A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't
| make the economics of training and hiring new grads work.
| At $70k-$110k it does, but not beyond that.
|
| 4. Companies have now adopted the Netflix model - by
| cutting low performers, we can actually give higher pay
| bands to employees who actually have a business impact,
| as can be reflected in the rise in 75th percentile tech
| salaries.
|
| [0] - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-
| collection/how-muc...
|
| [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/united-...
|
| [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/canada
|
| [3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/canada
|
| [4] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/united-...
|
| [5] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/compare_countries_resu...
|
| [6] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/compare_countries_resu...
|
| [7] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
| evantbyrne wrote:
| I think you make some solid points, but there are major
| tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If
| US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign
| workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers
| to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy
| for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire
| American developers is for quality. The other is simply
| that these companies exist in the US, which means
| collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which
| makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention
| the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can
| be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are
| significant even when well executed.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign
| workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers
| to migrate to the US whenever possible
|
| Not really.
|
| No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier
| of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to
| capture the higher talent tier because their salary
| expectations are based on their domestic condition.
|
| On top of that, the US immigration system is severely
| backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian
| nationals to become green card holders, and we as
| employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay
| the filing costs - not us.
|
| > other is simply that these companies exist in the US,
| which means collaboration needs to be done in US time
| zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient
| and having major negative impacts on worker morale
|
| Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure
| business continuity.
|
| On top of that, the bulk of layoffs during COVID were
| workers on work visas who were given the option to return
| to their home countries and open an office there.
|
| This is what Google did in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and
| Warsaw, Databricks in Bangalore, Amazon in Canada and
| India, and Nvidia in Bangalore.
|
| Furthermore, we as employers don't really sponsor VPs,
| Engineering Managers/Directors, Product Managers, and
| Staff/Principal Engineers on O-1 visas. Most are stuck on
| some form of EB1/2 or L1/2, and those who apply to O1s
| who aren't founders or extremely critical to the business
| are being sponsored but filing out-of-pocket.
|
| It just isn't attractive to immigrate to America long
| term anymore as a white collar employee in most cases now
| aside from unicorn roles which employees then use to
| boomerang back to executive roles or demand US salaries
| in their home country.
|
| Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but
| universities failed severely by watering down curricula
| in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a
| lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early
| career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just
| don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a
| competitive early career hiring pipeline.
|
| For example, in cybersecurity, I can hire someone in
| Israel who has done offensive security work for a couple
| years in a military, police, internal security capacity
| or someone in India who participated in one of the dozens
| of Police Force, Army, or Home Affairs cybersecurity
| internship programs. Similar programs like Cyberpatriots
| and the Cyber Incentive Program (approx $100M) were
| mismanaged as was found in a 2023-25 investigation by the
| DHS OIG [0][1] and an entire generation of students of
| cybersecurity scholarships quit in 2016 when the Trump 1
| admin cut funding for cybersecurity scholarship programs.
|
| [0] - https://fedscoop.com/cisa-cyber-incentive-program-
| dhs-inspec...
|
| [1] - https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/
| 2025-09/O...
| evantbyrne wrote:
| > No one wants to leave their families, and the upper
| tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to
| capture the higher talent tier because their salary
| expectations are based on their domestic condition.
|
| For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again
| they are willing to take the risk.
|
| > On top of that, the US immigration system is severely
| backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian
| nationals to become green card holders, and we as
| employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay
| the filing costs - not us.
|
| A challenge for sure. This and what you go on to describe
| could certainly shift some junior labor from H1B to
| remote contract. I would expect that shift to have a
| mostly net zero impact on other American exployment.
|
| > > other is simply that these companies exist in the US,
| which means collaboration needs to be done in US time
| zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient
| and having major negative impacts on worker morale
|
| > Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure
| business continuity.
|
| Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know
| that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be
| incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative
| time.
|
| > Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline,
| but universities failed severely by watering down
| curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which
| burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from
| hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in
| the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed
| to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
|
| Is that really what is happening? Because based on
| everything I can see, hiring standards are the highest
| they have ever been. As we get older, we have a bias
| towards underestimating the capabilities of younger
| generations, because we can see them making familiar
| mistakes in real-time.
| ponector wrote:
| I'm similar salary band, I pay 9% of my annual salary for
| mandatory medical insurance, but it's usually hard to get
| an appointment in reasonable time so you are going to pay
| extra 50-100EUR for a visit to the same doctor, but in
| private clinic. And also vaccination and dental is not
| covered by that 9% payment.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Jeez--I was making $50/hr in 2004 in one of my first jobs
| after I finished my PhD and opted out of academia. That
| pay didn't go that far back then!
|
| This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay
| curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and
| never gets better, but your costs keep rising,
| particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one
| kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left,
| and will then enter a dubious job market. My son is 15,
| so if he goes to college, I won't be paying tuition for
| him until Fall 2028.
|
| The problem is, I'm no longer a developer. I'm currently
| a nothing working on figuring out "something." I have a
| lot of skills and talents, but seemingly not many that
| will pay. I'm looking at any 2yr. training program that
| can get me certified to do something useful. It's so
| freaking bizarre to be sitting here with a degree in
| CS/Math, an MS in Computer Engineering from a very
| reputable university, and a doctorate in Information
| Management, also from a very reputable university, and
| looking at basically doing blue collar work! My nation
| has utterly failed me in every possible manner.
|
| I should add that we are looking to move out of our
| fairly high-cost of living state for a possibly lower
| cost of living state, but there are complications to that
| plan, too. My wife doesn't really want to move our son
| out of the high school he is in. I'm saying that other
| imperatives need to be addressed before they become full-
| blown crises. I'm being taxed to death, and costs like
| insurance are rising fast.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> My nation has utterly failed me in every possible
| manner._
|
| We've failed ourselves too, though. If I was some random
| person with endless money burning a hole in my pocket,
| what would I even do with a CS/Math/Computer
| engineer/Information manager? It is in no way clear how
| life is improved by working with such a person. Other
| industries put a lot of effort into marketing what
| function they serve. Said random person knows exactly
| when and why they'd want to hire a plumber, electrician,
| structural engineer, lawyer, accountant, physician, etc.
| But us...? We've rested on our laurels thinking Google,
| Microsoft, and Meta will forever want us, putting no
| effort into expanding our market.
| nabbed wrote:
| Sorry for being dense. What are GCCs and NCGs?
|
| I guess GCC night be Global Capability Center?
| alephnerd wrote:
| GCC - Global Capacity Center, basically instead of
| outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM, a company creates an entire
| office abroad that owns profit-loss, product roadmap, has
| executives present, and is a direct part of the company.
|
| NCG - New College Grad
|
| You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking
| questions!
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| So GCC is basically a subsidiary in another country?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| The big issue with outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM was you
| were essentially paying $30k-50k per head but getting the
| lowest tier of talent becuase those companies would pay
| around $5k-15k salaries to maximize their margins.
|
| As such, companies decided to just open offices in India,
| Poland, Czechia, etc to poach talent in those countries
| because people are only productive if well remunerated,
| and remove the middle man out of it.
|
| Ofc, the traditional Indian outsourcing companies like
| TCS [0] and HCL [1] have also begun pivoting away from
| Software outsourcing towards becoming end-to-end chip
| design companies, Infosys pivoting to becoming an end-to-
| end MedTech company [2], and Wipro becoming an aviation
| and defense manufacturer [3][4] because of a mix of
| Indian government subsidizes and Taiwanese, Japanese, and
| American FDI.
|
| [0] - https://www.tataelectronics.com/semiconductor-
| foundry
|
| [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-
| hcl-foxco...
|
| [2] - https://www.infosys.com/services/engineering-
| services/insigh...
|
| [3] - https://wiproaerospace.com/
|
| [4] - https://www.wiproinfra.com/
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| You can consider it a branch. It has all sorts of
| advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses
| - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay
| taxes on), you can fire them all if you want, especially
| if it is fairly small and replaceable. And you can sell
| the dream of promotion space in a large company, but they
| will almost never get that. And you cut the middleman and
| keep the money.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them
| the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero
| profits to pay taxes on)
|
| Nope.
|
| Subsidiaries need to pay domestic taxes which in a lot of
| cases are significantly higher than those in the US. That
| said, countries like Czechia, Poland, and India help by
| covering the cost of each employee per head depending on
| amount spent.
|
| > you can fire them all if you want
|
| Nope.
|
| In my past experience, we need to follow domestic labor
| laws and they do not budge on hiring or firing in
| Czechia, Poland, Israel, or India. Ofc, the financial hit
| of hiring the wrong person is much lower there than in
| the US, and unlike the US those jurisdictions provide a
| single window or tribunal dedicated to disputes foreign
| investors may face.
|
| Same with the UK and the film industry.
|
| -----------
|
| Basically, American jurisdictions became significantly
| non-responsive to services businesses after COVID and the
| 2020 election because white collar industries just didn't
| matter politically speaking (they represented a fraction
| of hiring and jobs in most competitive seats).
|
| The same kinds of hand-holding support I mentioned above
| used to be provided by jurisdictions like NC, the Bay
| Area, NY, TX, etc, but local politicians don't care
| anymore and local and state governments are severely
| backlogged and attritted significant amount of personnel
| who understood business promotion.
| lazide wrote:
| The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks
| who actually know things spend all their time selling new
| customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone
| shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved
| out of the actual dev teams.
|
| It's genius, in a way.
| luckylion wrote:
| This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that
| promise to have all the people you need and can either do
| entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers,
| QA, project managers etc on short notice.
|
| They have a few very competent developers who are primarily
| in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales
| contact is between non-technical management and their
| front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the
| second sales contact, technical staff from the potential
| client is involved and they bring along their real
| developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the
| project. They'll give you interviews with the developers
| you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and
| sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't
| touch type and develop purely by trial and error without
| forming a mental model.
|
| If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to
| them. At some point even a junior developer is better than
| not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that
| and they'll get replaced first.
| guluarte wrote:
| one of the main drivers is companies like Deel that make it
| very easy to hire remote workers anywhere and I think AWS will
| soon launch a similar service
| giantg2 wrote:
| Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to
| reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our
| existing IT workforce without outsourced roles.
|
| If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes
| it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per
| year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending
| on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of
| manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can
| pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require
| a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore
| will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like
| manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if
| we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we
| outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we
| could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the
| outsourced jobs with now?
| sixtyj wrote:
| Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management
| doesn't have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much
| more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with
| fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :)
|
| We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked
| with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I
| suppose...
| lazide wrote:
| Also, Indian culture has a huge 'overpromise, then try to
| cover it up' issue at all levels. Outsourcers have really
| mastered it though.
|
| Source: lived in India for a year.
| bonesss wrote:
| Hard truths about outsourcing: you're always dealing with
| a cultural, political, and legal gap.
|
| Stuff that's hella-illegal, that not even the remotest
| WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty
| from another perspective. Economics that favour that
| cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem
| wildly tempting on the other side.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to
| communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and
| also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many
| markets
| skywhopper wrote:
| Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately
| fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff
| can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
| lanstin wrote:
| Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase
| the development and operational bandwidth of the
| organization. This truth may not be known to the decision
| makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does
| increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of
| establishing a common technical vision, but these are
| mitigatable by for example sending entire software
| project to one region, with the colocated workers having
| a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of
| partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to
| have all the new shiny things done in North America and
| mature profitable software is owned by a remote region.
| Half smiley but this effect is real.
| paulcole wrote:
| Sure but if the cost savings is significant enough then
| there is plenty of incentive to overcome (or live with)
| those obstacles.
| nradov wrote:
| For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate
| delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end
| of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team
| farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per
| team member due to additional communication overhead and
| increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be
| acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external
| deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of
| project management discipline that most organizations lack.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > sure but people on the other side of the world are harder
| to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones
| and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many
| markets
|
| That's a pain management are willing to inflict upon /you/
|
| CTOs are aware of all the tradeoffs
| izacus wrote:
| People in Brazil and Mexico can work within US timezones
| just fine and aren't dumb.
| CivBase wrote:
| I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my
| coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have
| water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the
| opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to
| spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference
| room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.
| dingnuts wrote:
| physically being in the office is irrelevant. I can and do
| have water cooler chats with my remote teammates in the
| same tz as me while Manglesh is asleep in his
|
| Timezone matters
| lanstin wrote:
| If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really
| good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in
| India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are
| very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger
| bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when
| people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack
| (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard
| to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of
| day).
|
| I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997
| or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work
| from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or
| similar that can be done better and faster from home.
|
| But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people
| in other offices is silly.
| Tomcollins4 wrote:
| this is the funniest comment I've read in a while
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Kind of ironic and hypocritical that companies forced
| people back into the office, but have zero fucks about
| remote offshoring!
| echelon wrote:
| This is the biggest unspoken story in tech.
|
| The era of American developer exceptionalism is over.
|
| Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and
| increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced
| wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of
| American labor.
|
| You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work
| harder than their American counterparts.
|
| It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs,
| embedded, systems engineers, you name it.
|
| For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar.
| It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.
| thesmtsolver wrote:
| Any data backing this? If this were the case, why isn't
| most innovation done outside the US?
|
| Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US
| but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.
| brazukadev wrote:
| > If this were the case, why isn't most innovation done
| outside the US?
|
| Capital
| deeznuttynutz wrote:
| That's not even close to remotely true. If that is the
| case, why is the UAE throwing their money at US startups
| and not their own? They have more than enough "capital".
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about
| having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at
| everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just
| outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to
| the U.S. because of the education system, great access to
| capital, and the fact that they and other smart people
| could easily move to, live and work with each other in
| the U.S.
|
| The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the
| world (the EU is broken up across many
| languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can't really
| expand out).
|
| The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those
| planks right now.
|
| Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong,
| is being hurt by the government picking winners and
| choosers. If the current govt bets don't turn out to be
| the right ones we're looking at an ugly, probably tax
| payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this)
| collapse.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If this were the case, why isn't most innovation done
| outside the US?_
|
| Are you measuring by where the work is done, or where the
| people signing their names on it live? Two different
| things.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in
| the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.
|
| It used to be (since at least mid last century) and 0-1
| and 1-n jobs were focused here. The world becoming
| smaller allowed a lot of 1-n jobs to move abroad. But we
| kept 0-1 jobs here.
|
| That used to be the situation when the country brought
| people from around the world to be educated and then
| start business here. And historical precedent allowed us
| to continue thise advantages by having a reputation for
| it and continuing to support it. Our country for some
| reason now has decided it no longer wants to take the
| actions that fill the pipeline for 0-1 innovation.
|
| And the world just like it took over 1-n is going to take
| over 0-1.
|
| Why you would choose catalyze that change as an American,
| I have no idea.
|
| I think there are people that generally believe that
| there is magic dust that says it can only happen on US
| soil instead of there being structural actions taken to
| enable it.
|
| We will all very quickly learn that 0-1 can be anywhere
| that 1-n is.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| If software engineering is not special and can be done by
| anyone, so can any other role in a business. So it follows
| that all American roles will be offshored eventually,
| including ownership of the company itself - or American
| businesses will be universally out competed.
| nradov wrote:
| Perhaps someday. But for now the USA has broader, deeper,
| and more sophisticated capital markets than every other
| country and economic bloc. This is one of the key reasons
| why most of the largest and fastest growing tech
| companies are still largely owned and located here.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > If software engineering is not special and can be done
| by anyone, so can any other role in a business.
|
| Indeed, however other business roles have a significant
| physical presence or face to face component. Sales &
| marketing, legal, HR, and significant parts of operations
| and admin have physical presence requirements in most
| businesses. I would expect finance/accounting to be
| vulnerable to offshoring, though.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Accounting and bookkeeping already is
| com2kid wrote:
| If all the workers are off shore, no need to keep HR
| state side.
|
| If all the high earners are off shore, may as well sell
| to them with an off shore sales team.
|
| Don't need local marketers if the market isn't local
| anymore.
| fullshark wrote:
| > If software engineering is not special and can be done
| by anyone, so can any other role in a business.
|
| What's the logic here other than "coders are the top tier
| of the labor market" arrogance?
| tehjoker wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_pro
| fit...
| pizlonator wrote:
| I think other business roles have been offshored for a
| long time now, and software engineering is relatively
| late to that party
| FpUser wrote:
| >"If software engineering is not special"
|
| Correction - "The US / Canada software" engineering.
|
| Otherwise people from many other countries are just as
| good while charging way less.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Absolutely! $50k is [?]45,00,000 which is at the 95th
| percentile of tech salary in India across all levels of
| seniority.
|
| So yeah it's not surprising that jobs are going offshore.
| chongli wrote:
| 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
| lazide wrote:
| It's the lakh and crore system
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system].
|
| Older than western civilization probably, but does take
| some getting used too.
| aloisdg wrote:
| Look for Lakh, crore and the whole indian numbering
| system. It is interesting. Source: I use to live in
| India.
| ido wrote:
| It was extremely difficult to get used to when I was
| visiting India for a few months years ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| 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
| skywhopper wrote:
| Nah, none of this is precisely true. Even if the folks
| abroad are just as skilled (true), they aren't as effective
| because of primarily time zone differences and also
| language barriers (which is exacerbated by the time zone
| differences).
| lazide wrote:
| Not really, rather industry incentives switched from
| competing on quality (by whatever metric one might use), to
| competing on cost.
|
| And developer costs had gotten so crazy, this was the
| perfect storm.
| lisbbb wrote:
| The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech
| jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better
| paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now
| gone. I think that has major consequences for the US
| economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-
| tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many
| years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher
| degrees and certifications (I never really believed in
| certs, mind you, I always thought it was a giant scam).
|
| Everything I look into as far as 2nd career goes has a very
| high barrier to entry and then there's the ever-present
| ageism barrier to fight, too.
|
| I'm fortunate in that I have enough money to maybe just be
| retired, but most of you aren't anywhere close to being
| that financially independent. It's going to be ugly.
|
| I knew for years that the offshoring blitz would finally
| reach critical mass and I was correct. Now it is an
| economic conflagration.
| pizlonator wrote:
| > and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now
|
| It's worse than that. Who is going to pay the doctors and
| lawyers (and other folks providing services) if there are
| no more US jobs that product stuff for export.
|
| And it's not even about services. Who is going to pay the
| home builders, electricians, plumbers, etc in a world
| where there is no money flowing into the US economy from
| the outside
| SL61 wrote:
| This is a big issue for young people, too. Every white
| collar career path is very on-rails now - you're expected
| to get a degree in XYZ and then get a fresh grad job as a
| Level 1 XYZer and so on.
|
| So the stakes are drastically higher for 18 year olds
| picking their college majors. It's effectively a life
| commitment for a specific career path, and there's a lot
| of anxiety among students because they don't know if the
| career path they're betting the farm on will still be be
| viable by the time they graduate. There's also a sense
| that if you can't manage to find work in the field you
| majored in within a year or two of graduating, you've
| fallen off the track and are condemned to DoorDashing
| forever.
|
| I'm always amazed at how many older people I know
| (especially 60+) spent their twenties directionless and
| then started a decent paying career in their 30s, often
| by simply learning how to do something and getting a job
| doing it. I'm not sure what policy platform would make
| that possible again, but accomplishing it would alleviate
| a ton of the anxiety that young people have today.
| debo_ wrote:
| React Engineer
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| The gap has never been technical. It's culture.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Maybe, but I was looking for a job recently and _most_
| "remote" jobs from US companies were still US-only. Some
| allowed for hiring people in US timezones or close
| (basically the Americas). Very few were open to anyone in
| the world. I get the impression it's mostly the admin
| hassle that makes most companies avoid it.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| 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 justify our higher salaries anymore.
|
| Just outright insane.
| munificent wrote:
| Remote work benefits workers too, though:
|
| 1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities.
| This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing
| because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.
|
| 2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can
| work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of
| where you live.
|
| 3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are
| stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other
| local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and
| moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that
| doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with
| their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a
| mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.
|
| In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency
| of the job market for employees.
| gruez wrote:
| >In general, more job flexibility increases the
| efficiency of the job market for employees.
|
| It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but
| that's not the same as saying that first world software
| engineers (already highly paid and previously protected
| from foreign competition) would be better off.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| 1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of
| the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive
| Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost
| of the cheapest American city with far more culture and
| things to do. And if you were willing to move to the
| cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again.
|
| 2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs,
| especially the highest paying ones, were located in the
| U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the
| U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More
| American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs
| opened up to someone living in SF.
|
| 3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case
| costs = developer salaries.
|
| So you're right. We got more efficient. We reduced the
| average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very
| few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs
| are moving/will move to places where people are willing
| to work for less.
| citadel_melon wrote:
| Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More
| efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and
| thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a
| competitive labor market.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| Just a note on point 1:
|
| As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub
| continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can
| categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live
| in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family's home
| city which falls into this bracket).
|
| I'm not sure if you've travelled much around the sub
| continent but I'd say you're quite badly romanticising
| it. Yes we have our own culture which is different to
| that of the USA but, as with all things, there are A Lot
| of aspects of the culture here which are not admirable.
| leosanchez wrote:
| > I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants
| to live in the cheapest Indian cities
|
| Sorry to burst your bubble but, I love living in my T3
| city I was born in.
|
| Don't talk for 1.4 billion people.
|
| Thanks.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Don't talk for 1.4 billion people.
|
| The data for Indians moving out of India does the
| talking.
| nine_k wrote:
| While what you write is correct, the parent speaks about
| the _most expensive_ tier of Indian cities, which are
| quite a bit nicer.
| torginus wrote:
| And are just as expensive as most nice places in the US
| decimalenough wrote:
| Well, no, not really. Top tier Indian cities like
| Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are expensive and horribly
| dysfunctional when it comes to pollution, traffic,
| hygiene, dealing with government bureaucracy, etc. Having
| money insulates you from some but by no means all of
| this.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| The parent literally mentions 'the cheapest Indian
| cities'.
|
| As others have said, even the richest cities have a
| swathe of issues which simply do not exist in the west
| (reasons for which are another discussion).
|
| *looks at air pollution chart which is literally at 359
| right this second (01:38)*
| sumedh wrote:
| Have you ever travelled in Mumbai city trains during peak
| hour, I can assure you it's not nice. Look up videos on
| Youtube.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with either country, but I feel
| like that's not really true
|
| this is comparing Seattle and Mumbai
|
| https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
|
| Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap
| stuff is much worse than in the US though).
|
| Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the
| US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-
| bar-none access to financial services, with abundant
| cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on
| the same income.
| oytis wrote:
| > More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global
| jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
|
| As someone living in EU and working (and job hunting) for
| American companies for the last N years I just have never
| seen it happen. American companies were opening
| subsidiaries in Europe long before COVID - they were just
| making everyone go to office there. Surge of remote work
| didn't seem to bring new American jobs to Europe as far
| as I could see - if anyone was hiring remotely, it were
| the same companies that already were hiring for in-office
| jobs before. Meanwhile, most remote jobs by American
| companies seem to be open for American residents only.
|
| Thing is, for most locations, you still need to establish
| a legal presense to hire there, and that is enough of
| bureacratic burden for most companies to expand their
| geography very sparingly
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Claims 1 would be difficult to back with evidence.
|
| Some may accept a significantly lower pay (to go such a
| long way), but many wouldn't.
|
| Overall my observation is that costs of living doesn't
| proportionally follow compensation. The far stretched
| example is how offshore staff often live in countries
| with costs of living at about a fifth, earning a third of
| their counterparts in the U.S or other top paying
| countries
|
| Of course for skilled jobs perfectly doable remote such
| as software engineers.
|
| I may be biased by the fact it also makes sense, a worker
| understands the value provided to the business is more or
| less equal, and since we live in a market society, why
| wouldn't it be expected to earn the same. In effect we
| don't earn the same no matter the location, but it is
| somewhere between that and aligned to location comp.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| > It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities.
|
| ...
|
| > switching jobs means uprooting and moving. ... moving
| can be extremely disruptive.
|
| This one thing has two aspects that you claim is both a
| benefit and a drawback simultaneously.
|
| Everything is trade-offs.
| throw234234234 wrote:
| I find that some tech workers don't understand economics
| that well. In general more efficiency for an industry
| means less wages per unit of output worked across a whole
| industry. The benefit of "efficiency" usually accrues to
| customers of a service, not providers.
|
| Efficiency benefits society at large, at the expense of
| the people being made more efficient. This is just
| capitalism and the result of price (and also sometimes
| societal respect) being a function of scarcity of a
| product/skill.
|
| There's a reason construction unions, doctor's
| associations, and the like exist - to promote members
| interests (i.e. predominately money). If you can cartel
| an industry to produce lower efficiencies; assuming that
| a disruptor can't break into your market and ruin your
| party your members will accrue higher salaries and
| usually given our system more respect from peers in
| society. Locally I'm hearing "get a trade"; and when I
| say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the
| profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over
| the last decade.
| CalRobert wrote:
| There's quite a lot of arrogance about foreigners just not
| being good enough. Turns out smart people are everywhere.
| gnerd00 wrote:
| > There's quite a lot of arrogance
|
| that covers more bases
| lisbbb wrote:
| Companies don't even care, honestly. Some have uptime
| requirements that they get fined over if things go
| sideways, but besides that, they don't even care.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Theres an equal amount of experience showing that the
| claims that cheap outsourced workers produce less output
| of lesser quality is true.
|
| Neither generalization works for ALL cases but hand wavey
| claims of some ism is small comfort to those of us who've
| seen the results more than once.
|
| And I've worked with excellent offshored workers as well,
| but that doesn't make claims to the contrary invalid.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for
| the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and
| surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of
| them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper
| management typically never hears about that and just
| thinks they are saving money because they are cheap.
|
| There is also a big difference in mindset between an
| employee hoping to advance their career at a company,
| trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized
| by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc,
| and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is
| just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the
| quality of the codebase or building value for the
| company.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| If upper management think that they don't deserve to be
| upper management.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| In many companies there is little flow of real
| information from the bottom up. Upper management only
| hears what everyone understands they want to hear.
|
| If the top down message is "this is the direction, make
| it work", and people further down in the hierarchy
| understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his
| plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't
| working, then he is not going to hear it.
| lisbbb wrote:
| It was going to happen anyways. I was working remote 2-3
| days a week before 2020 hit and that was mainly due to how
| bad my commute was time-wise. It was exhausting. But it's
| because the team I was working with was all in other cities
| and countries and so I was driving to an office location
| just to badge in. I barely even talked to anyone there. It
| became a terrible job for that reason alone. Much of what
| made my career was developing professional contacts and
| colleagues and Covid took all that away from me to the
| point that it killed my career. Now a lot of us are in the
| same situation and I'm here to tell you, I think this is it
| --it's never coming back this time. You can hope it does,
| but hope is not a strategy.
| ghaff wrote:
| The people I worked with were pretty distributed before
| COVID--partially because functions (and geo regions) were
| distributed anyway--and partly for other reasons. When
| COVID hit there was basically very little effort to co-
| locate most teams. Some companies did try to pull people
| back but in a lot of cases, it was a matter of RTO but
| that was a good way to do a mass layoff. Many companies
| didn't want to do that.
|
| I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events
| but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone
| long before I semi-retired.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| "Foreman says, 'These jobs are going, boys, and they
| ain't coming back'"
|
| -Bruce Springsteen (1984)
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| You were being off shored before remote work was ever a
| thing lol.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer
| in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus
| co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There's no way we
| could have hired all this specialized talent in any one
| city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-
| person dynamics, but I can't imagine how you'd build this
| kind of team without remote work.
| nine_k wrote:
| Startups are a different deal. Everyone knows everyone,
| people are hired for their specific talents, management
| barely exists, there are no executive types disconnected
| from the reality in the lower levels of the company, no
| turf wars of middle management, etc. (This is why I
| prefer working for startups.)
|
| Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that
| looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works
| to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par
| of the course :(
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| This argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced
| remote work with unions. All that power and opportunity and
| they squandered it thinking their bosses and management was
| on their side.
|
| Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have
| magically protected you these layoffs.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Will the union advocate against H1B and offshoring?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| They have been for decades: https://aflcio.org/about/lead
| ership/statements/reform-h-1b-a...
| Chance-Device wrote:
| More insane than specifically developing AIs to write
| software, creating competition from machines as well? As a
| group we're not exactly rational.
| Tryk wrote:
| Imagine if there was a push to create a professional
| organization to handle qualification, certifications etc.
| Like there is for doctors, dentist, accountants and other
| fields
| YZF wrote:
| Offshoring didn't start in Covid and it still has the issues
| of time zone, culture, etc.
|
| You're not wrong in that companies are looking to hire in
| cheaper geographies but I think the remote aspect is just a
| small part of it. Another part is that SV comp has shot
| through the roof because RSUs. There are also arguably more
| and better people available in the cheaper geographies.
|
| But it's not a zero sum game and there are still a lot of
| tech jobs in North America. AI hasn't reduced that total
| number of jobs.
| xienze wrote:
| > All that effort convincing management you're just as
| effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch
| to outsource your role.
|
| Here's the thing though. People have been trying to outsource
| software development since the late 90s. Every time I've been
| around offshoring efforts wherever they were implemented, a
| few years later onshoring would happen again. It turns out
| time zones, thick Indian accents, and poor quality control
| have been and still are major obstacles to overcome.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| There are plenty of studies showing that remote work
| increases productivity that have been published before or
| after COVID, and similar case studies showing the dangers of
| off shoring. In a perfect world, a business that correctly
| understands these studies would be rewarded.
| questionableans wrote:
| Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the
| best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I've
| interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren't
| anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job,
| I'll probably get bored and frustrated by it.
|
| High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For
| every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who's been
| tempted by the pay and relevant new problems, I often feel
| like we've gotten 10x as many people who would otherwise have
| been uninspired doctors and lawyers or top business majors.
| normie3000 wrote:
| Where do you find these people?
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Check the pile of CVs that HR rejected. You will be
| shocked at the talent in there.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and
| the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at
| very comparable salaries to the west.
|
| The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of
| the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a
| semblance of competence.
|
| In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after
| outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders
| online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of
| work they outsource to India.
|
| We will see something similar happen to other companies in a
| year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts
| and hope we don't get layed off before then.
| moneywoes wrote:
| > Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India
| and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often
| at very comparable salaries to the west.
|
| In those locations?
|
| Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just
| shift their r& operations there then?
| decimalenough wrote:
| The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while
| new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an
| R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining
| skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to
| offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to
| entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap
| teams.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies
| just shift their r& operations there then?
|
| There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out
| there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the
| workplace, where your average software engineer or
| engineering manager has very little understanding of what
| they're actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN,
| which will tell you the quality of engineering in India).
|
| For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be
| only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay
| out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend
| does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at
| almost that level.
|
| [1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/
| zachlatta wrote:
| Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn't fair to
| pick one example and generalize to say an entire
| country's talent pool is poor.
|
| The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world
| and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as
| bad (or worse) than the one you linked.
| torginus wrote:
| > In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked
| after outsourcing work to India.
|
| Does sound more like correllation than causation. Was there
| evidence that the Indian devs made the mistakes that led to
| the hack or was it just the good old 'let's fall back on
| racism to avoid blame' by management? I still remember the
| articles where Boeing tried to peg the 737 MAX crashes on
| Indian engineers who worked for $10 an hour.
| irilesscent wrote:
| Its more about social engineering (this was the case for
| the m&s hack), if you outsource your work, you have less
| visibility over the people that work for you and it
| becomes more of a black box. This leads to worse employee
| awareness in general.
| bradlys wrote:
| > Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for
| FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the
| west.
|
| I've never heard of typical senior engineers getting paid
| $400k/yr in those locations.
|
| Outside the US, I've only heard of Zurich being the only
| comparable location.
| czhu12 wrote:
| its kind of hard to imagine that FAANG employees in india
| and philippines get paid as much as the west when London is
| a 30-50% cut from the Bay Area.
|
| Just perusing on google for roles at google in hyderabad, I
| think its significantly lower than the US.
| cogman10 wrote:
| They do though. My company hires in India and has had a
| hard time retaining talent there because anyone with
| mediocre talent can get western salaries by switching to
| larger companies than our own.
|
| We've lost a decent number of engineers to Google,
| Facebook, and Amazon in India.
|
| My company wants to pay roughly $50k USD in India per dev
| and that's just not enough. They've tried to compete by
| making nicer facilities and better in office benefits
| (like a cafeteria) but it's just not enough.
| jamespo wrote:
| FAANG may offer those devs more than your company will in
| India but I'd be very surprised if they offer them
| similar compensation to FAANG devs in the West and
| specifically the US.
| jlouis wrote:
| Talent eventually get paid their value. Doesn't matter
| where they live. If you have a brain, you rank up.
| Quickly.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for
| FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the
| west.
|
| As other commenters have pointed out, this is simply
| bullshit. Good talent in India and the Philippines earn
| nowhere near US dev salaries. Unless by "very comparable"
| you mean 1/3 - 1/2.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Jaguar/ Rang Rover is owned by Tata, and they created a
| massive $2B hole in the UK enconomy
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol.
| Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit
| differences in vastly different standards of living between
| very very different economies.
|
| Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's
| and execs don't like.
|
| It has very little to do with their literal position on earth
| in relation to a company's real estate foot print.
|
| Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word
| you used in your comment... "collective."
|
| The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor
| for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for
| it.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Talented workers get talented pay
|
| > It has very little to do with their literal position on
| earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print.
|
| Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in
| other positions on earth.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in
| other positions on earth.
|
| Which to be clear: is not happening.
|
| They're buying very low cost labor and are hoping to
| power through it for some sweet juicy numbers.
| cj wrote:
| What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter)
| an inherently worse developer than someone in the US?
|
| (Unless that's not what you're implying?)
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Nothing. Don't think I said that, I certainly don't think
| it.
| cj wrote:
| In that case I'm having trouble following your logic
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Not sure where the gap would be, it's pretty straight
| forward.
| ipaddr wrote:
| For India they culturally value different skills and
| roles. They value pair programming and treat great ideas
| from juniors as a negative. Japan has a different work
| culture that doesn't fit the open model in the west.
|
| The issue in the EU is local EU companies don't pay as
| well because they don't have to (little competition). And
| a culture of not paying high salaries but paying higher
| taxes.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Talented workers get talented pay. But global average of
| talented pay is much different than average of talented pay
| in HCOL areas.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Right, but, to be clear, that's not what happened in the
| case of the original post. They claim they were a senior
| dev who got replaced by several less effective junior
| devs.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| What "managerial" class are you speaking of? Because most
| managers in tech do not make much more than the developers
| they manage.
| torginus wrote:
| He's likely talking about strategic not operative
| management. Not the Team Lead of a dev team, but VPs,
| department heads, C-levels etc, the kind of people who
| set quarterly goals and sign contracts.
|
| They're an insular and distinct class unto themselves
| usually, and there's very little movement (or and very
| different candidate pool) between devs and them.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As someone who over the past couple of years _was_
| responsible for some of these hiring decisions, it
| absolutely _is_ a part of it ... lol.
|
| I've worked with absolutely fantastic developers in
| Argentina, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. You're right,
| talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in
| Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco.
| Teams are used to working entirely remotely now,
| videoconferencing software is great, and teams mostly align
| to US timezones (not entirely, but for example Eastern
| European workers shifted their day a few hours later so we
| get at least 4-5 hours overlap every day).
|
| I think companies are a lot smarter about outsourcing now
| than they were 15-20 years ago and focus more on developer
| quality, but I've absolutely seen that a company will be
| much happier to hire 2 excellent senior devs from Poland
| for what you could get for 1 junior college hire in a high
| cost of living area in the US.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| 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 part of it ... lol.
|
| Because you're not hiring people from elsewhere because
| of "well I don't need people HERE anymore." The calculus
| is the same it ever was, even before COVID.
|
| Companies were already out-sourcing before great video
| conferencing software or an understanding of how to work
| with remote teams.
|
| It's an exploitation of different economies, at the
| expense of the American working class.
|
| It's the same thing, just under a shiny new label
| designed to absolve the managerial class from said
| exploitation.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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 Poland, India,
| Czechia, Israel, etc with ex-American leadership is good
| enough.
|
| I warned about this during COVID on HN and was downvoted
| constantly.
|
| Pretending that the 2000s-era experience can inform
| decisions we make in the 2020s is completely flawed.
|
| Being in denial of the "brave new world" is only going to
| do you harm as an IC.
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is arguing that the basic idea of
| offshoring was invented after the COVID pandemic... But
| rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards
| remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated
| the process
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards
| remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated
| the process
|
| By what metrics?
| gedy wrote:
| Like every person I knew who "went remote" was so they _could
| afford a home_. Which they weren 't able to do next to office
| with what you all are paying.
|
| It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle
| thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"
| ghaff wrote:
| By no means universal. I was increasingly remote even
| before COVID because I did a lot of business and other
| travel--even if I was never officially fully remote until
| very late in the game. Never moved from the house I owned
| through a number of jobs with better and worse commutes.
| But, then, didn't live in California though did live in
| what is generally considered a tech center.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts,
| and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In
| fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where
| outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed
| internet isn't uniform enough for folks to be able to just
| work from home.
|
| Additionally, companies can't _just_ hire individuals in
| other countries. They have to set up business entities and
| that costs significant money to do. It's why they mostly work
| with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where
| these people come in and work.
| phil21 wrote:
| Everything about this is the opposite from my experience.
|
| No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the
| old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored
| devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to
| now competing directly with the largest names in the
| industry for those workers.
|
| It is not hard at all to employ people "directly" in most
| countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will
| handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up
| a local "office" with a cheap office manager and attorney
| on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and
| structure might be opaque, but the end result is
| effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with
| them is concerned.
|
| Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are
| treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed
| from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source
| of friction is timezone.
|
| Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire
| world now in any even moderately sized city. It's not 2005
| any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before
| Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this
| anywhere I've done business.
|
| I've worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this
| point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me,
| and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts
| on HN are just in denial or clueless.
|
| > The largest difference and source of friction is
| timezone.
|
| Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much
| less desire to outsource software work to India or China
| (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to
| Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western
| Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-
| based companies.
| phil21 wrote:
| One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of
| industry I can think of in my lifetime.
|
| I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to
| do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide
| average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the
| world who could even compete at their level. No project
| managers anywhere who could do the job for less than
| $200k/yr.
|
| One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be
| productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to
| extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented
| folks out there in the world than many anticipated.
|
| The hubris was (and is) crazy to me.
| overfeed wrote:
| It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective
| of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers
| due to shutdowns.
|
| The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth
| diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a
| while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly
| boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does
| it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an
| employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to
| in their employment contract) if they clone their product
| from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your
| remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your
| competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence -
| as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams
| and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An
| unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL
| phil21 wrote:
| There was and is a collective push to show remote work is
| just as effective as in-office. To the point of
| absurdity, where there were never any benefits to office
| work.
|
| It was absolutely a self-own. People not understanding
| why they were being paid the salaries they were and how
| replaceable they might be.
|
| It was more or less an entire workforce demanding that
| their job positions be opened up to global competition
| thinking there would be no negative long term outcomes
| from it. They effectively helped offshore their own jobs.
|
| This is just starting - inertia is a thing, and it takes
| years to stand up competent local engineering teams in
| various countries. The past few years has simply been
| laying down the base infrastructure for what is starting
| to visibly happen today.
| throw-52 wrote:
| I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or
| out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership
| everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality,
| and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as
| they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling
| narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy
| scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do
| anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being
| fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but
| that's just about products and platforms, we need a better
| term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten
| economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that
| surprising, but the extent to which investors and even
| workers are often onboard too _is_ surprising. Vandalism
| economy? Expertise simply isn 't valued for the same reason
| that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on
| the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.
| acephal wrote:
| Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment
| masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look
| what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be
| fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice"
| and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring.
| The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in
| literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire
| premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this
| faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your
| negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get
| back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.
| fruitworks wrote:
| What does renegotiating labor in the face of increased
| labor supply mean other than just "accept a worse deal"?
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I didn't think about that but you may be right. I think what
| might be non-debatable is that setting up the ability to work
| remotely definitely makes it easier to outsource someone's
| job. Whether that's causal or makes sense with other factors
| would vary company by company. Remote jobs are easier to
| outsource, though.
|
| One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He
| showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something
| at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then.
| He told me his job required being physical plant to assess,
| program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over
| the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be
| outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only
| threatens work opportunities for one of us.
| leros wrote:
| I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many
| companies are laying off their US engineering teams and
| replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this
| notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem
| like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian
| teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans,
| produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great
| English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and
| productive and comfortable and lazy.
|
| 15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not
| great if you calculated the hourly.
|
| Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the
| pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript
| to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for
| $170k.
|
| The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| So much fantasy landing in the comments here.
|
| I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not
| "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the
| work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was
| essentially the highest pay you could get outside of
| professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or
| lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I
| made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most
| other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing
| really remarkable.
|
| With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I
| doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a
| better developer all of a sudden, it was just that
| startups had piles of money and investors demanding that
| they spend it.
|
| 15-20 years ago software development was still very well
| paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane
| FAANG money started flowing.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| This could not have been said here in 2021 or 2022. It's
| disappointing to see how easily opinions change with the
| zeitgeist.
| ugh123 wrote:
| 100%
| ponector wrote:
| Cannot fully agree with this. I've just been fired from
| remote job. My remote contact position after 4 years was
| replaced with internal full-time position. I could convert to
| employee if I was willing to relocate to Bratislava and take
| a huge pay cut. I'm in Eastern Europe already, but cannot
| agree to EUR40k salary offer.
|
| It's not like they don't have money, it was an insurance
| company with $1bn in quarterly profit. Market is extremely
| unfavorable for IT talents currently.
| time0ut wrote:
| My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US
| by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit,
| their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an
| officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based
| on private conversations with the executives and what is
| actually happening.
| RobRivera wrote:
| This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good
| enough after threats from competition is relatively secured.
|
| I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot
| of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice
| infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup
| mill goes brrrr
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Exactly this, articles of that tone are starting to surface. AI
| is often the pretext, because it makes sense to replace labour
| with technology. The dissonance is why those who make layoff
| decisions refuse to accept reality, that AI does not replace
| staff.
|
| One thing also contradicting the "AI can do it" argument, is
| that a business's playbook is to rather expand the work force
| in order to multiply the effect of technology. Yet they lay off
| in waves.
|
| There is no dissonance, just a disguise: Several big tech
| companies in the US cut their workforce, in the US, while
| expanding it in countries where talent is cheaper.
|
| Paradoxally, junior folks have it even worse. It has become
| very difficult to land a job without experience, again, in the
| US. It all makes sense, if you replace US based senior staff
| with Junior staff on different time zone, and having a
| different culture, you are left with nobody to mentor and
| supervise junior so staff.
|
| I still can't explain how ending up with more Junior staff,
| offshore, less senior staff and little to no Junior staff
| locally will pay off in the long term.
|
| I guess I will figure that out, but for now that's one piece of
| the puzzle I can only call an "economic downturn" outlook.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Or it's just plain, boring cost cutting because finance is
| looking down the barrel of a grim YoY outlook. Companies are
| hurting, and GenAI can't get people to spend more money with
| them.
| com2kid wrote:
| The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to
| completely destroy our international competitiveness.
|
| Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to
| housing costs.
|
| Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to
| because the cost of living here and salary expectations where
| 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed.
|
| Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all
| our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that
| America is competitive in on a large scale.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Don't you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay
| because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing
| market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there
| com2kid wrote:
| If construction had kept up with demand salary wouldn't
| have skyrocketed and the overall cost of living would be
| lower.
|
| High salaries that exist just to pay for high house prices
| hurt everyone.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But
| even if all the construction in the world happens, would
| you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not
| a chance. Everyone wants it.
| torginus wrote:
| In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project,
| you're working long hours, making very little visible progress,
| you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.
|
| All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking
| 'why isn't it ready yet'.
|
| Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come
| out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along,
| 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops
| and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly
| charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's
| talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall
| over each other to get to lead it.
|
| But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise
| any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really
| have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap
| juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles -
| hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is
| management does not have to depend on _you_ , they can play
| their human resource games.
|
| 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up
| half a year after development' - well if it was good enough
| with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's
| going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs
| can fix it.
|
| This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the
| code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business
| requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road
| until they can fix it.
| franktankbank wrote:
| What dev to do then?
| WalterSear wrote:
| IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own
| product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI
| implementation requires is clearly exponential to
| complexity of the organization.
|
| You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building
| faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have
| more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of
| building a business imaginable.
|
| And _almost everyone larger than you is finding it harder
| to achieve similar productivity gains from implementing AI,
| if not outright struggling with it._ This is a golden
| moment and won 't last long.
| ponector wrote:
| It was never an issue to build something. The challenge
| is to sell your product to cover dev costs at least.
| WalterSear wrote:
| That too, is easier than ever.
|
| It's just work, there's no secrets to it.
| rcbdev wrote:
| This markedly does not apply if the stack is esoteric enough
| and/or the code is bad enough.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't think aspiring to write awful backends in Elixir is
| the solution to this problem.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Like alcohol, technically it is a solution.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs
| are going to fix subtle race conditions...
|
| They'll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away
| though..
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new
| devs are going to fix subtle race conditions...
|
| > They'll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away
| though..
|
| I don't think torginus's point is that the new devs will
| find the proper fixes for the code, more that such a hack
| might be good enough in the eyes of both the company's
| management and the company's users.
|
| As much as it pains me to recognize this (as a fan of
| clean, elegant code) not every bit of software needs to be
| clean and elegant to achieve its intended purpose (which
| is, at least in the corporate software world being
| discussed here, to make money).
|
| If you meet the needs of your software's users, you can
| make a lot of money for a lot of years selling a piece of
| crap held together with chewing gum and elastic bands (and
| many companies have).
| lanstin wrote:
| A old Twitter thread: "what's one thing you wish you didn't
| know about cloud providers? Answer: eventual consistency
| means it just sleeps and retries all the way down."
| captainkrtek wrote:
| > 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that
| popped up half a year after development' - well if it was
| good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half
| a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until
| the new devs can fix it.
|
| From my time at AWS, and in light of the recent DynamoDB dns
| race condition bug, this is a line of thinking that is
| problematic.
|
| There is so much complexity in the inner workings of any one
| of those services. Many of those services are now composed of
| many teams, each having turned over completely multiples of
| times.
|
| Yes there are runbooks and knowledge passed down from each
| generation, to some extent. But when you hit some critical
| outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems
| have such a different relationship to the system having
| simply maintained it vs. built it.
| ncphillips wrote:
| > In my experience, if you're working on a green-field
| project, you're working long hours, making very little
| visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make
| important decisions.
|
| Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience.
| Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of
| highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to
| stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex
| additional features.
| thisisit wrote:
| A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was
| replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was
| that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened
| was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs
| etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They
| decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to
| pay 10% of US salaries instead.
|
| With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the
| overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the
| bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe.
| Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom
| line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but
| cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at
| 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am
| personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in
| and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep
| pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI
| hallucinations at all.
| almosthere wrote:
| Sorry to hear, as well as to many others.
| exasperaited wrote:
| 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 ridiculous Macguffin they can't
| just fire people without making them formally redundant.
|
| The damage that is going to be done in the USA if the AI bubble
| bursts is going to be generational.
| lisbbb wrote:
| It already is. The US is currently missing an entire generation
| of journeyman tech workers because they never got hired in the
| first place. It's like when Cash for Clunkers got rid of so
| many used vehicles that it caused market distortions for years.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| Slightly tangential to the article: a lot of the "AI layoffs" are
| really just old fashioned layoffs, but with exciting press
| releases meant to reassure investors.
|
| AMZN for example overhired in various functions because it
| expected demand that never materialised. Admitting that is bad
| for the share price, but writing some woo about "AI and agility"
| will convince at least some investors to keep the faith.
| alecco wrote:
| This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year
| subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in
| inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o
|
| Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens
| of billions of investments in new offices.
|
| Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an
| obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening:
|
| Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India
| https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-...
| (Jan 2025)
|
| Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India
| https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi...
| (3 weeks ago)
|
| [Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud's Chief Product
| https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na...
| (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian
| Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India)
|
| Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest
| 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years
| https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy...
| (September)
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi...
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t...
|
| and so on. Something very crazy is going on.
|
| NOTE: I am _not_ American and this doesn 't affect me directly.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Confirmation bias, maybe? 15B is like 1.5% of a trillion
| dollars currently being invested in AI..
| manquer wrote:
| A lot of "AI" investment in countries like India is just
| annotation and labeling kind of work .
|
| It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as
| the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of
| people work on curating data for model training.
|
| Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business
| processing massively is just inline with that.
|
| Any compute investment is largely local . Internet and
| Electricity is expensive and erratic, there is red tape, loads
| of import duties, there are dozens of cheaper places for cheap
| data centers.
|
| All this to say it is not the kind of outsourcing you think it
| is.
|
| ---
|
| There is a some amount of high tech outsourcing happening,
| those are driven by challenges in getting even a business visa
| in last 5 years.
|
| those numbers are quite small in aggregate won't be news
| worthy.
|
| India simply does not have that kind of high quality talent
| pool .
|
| The education system is both expensive and very poor. There is
| shortage of qualified teachers, even bigger shortage of good
| ones. Students and parents just want to get a "degree"
| /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to
| learn.
| alecco wrote:
| > 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?
| manquer wrote:
| A lot of IT work that gets done in India is low skill
| things that could be automated even before AI codegen
| tools. These jobs are particularly vulnerable to AI
| productivity gains .
|
| The thesis here is that current gen tools should enable 2
| people do the work of 10 and LLM models get paid the budget
| of 2-3 devs.
|
| The outsourcing org comes out ahead with spending only 70%
| as before (salary of remaining devs will naturally
| increase)
|
| ----
|
| India is by far the largest market for this. 1yr free is
| for same reason any VC funded company discounts their
| product or gives it free first, or Microsoft famously
| rather have you use their software pirated than not at all.
|
| This is only to get adoption, if your workers only know how
| to code with Claude or Codex then you are going to buy
| those tools as a company
|
| Nobody is going back once you get them to change. OpenAI et
| al hope to capture 30% value of the IT outsourcing sector
| while making to cheaper by 30%. There is no free lunch.
|
| ----
|
| The number of CS "grads" are not a useful metric for India.
|
| The industry shifted to hiring other engineering streams to
| any grads with aptitude to learn a long while back.
|
| The vast majority of them don't have any programming
| skills, don't have critical thinking skills, are poor at
| communication.
|
| They are unemployable. Don't take it from me, NASSCOM says
| this too.
|
| The degrees are largely from mills that charge up to
| $80k-$100k (med degrees go even higher) promising jobs but
| don't teach much.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| This is a sales tactic, in the same way that Jetbrains and
| Microsoft will give out free licenses for students in the
| hopes that some of them will go on to work for employers
| who will then buy the product. It also helps convince
| investors about potential growth and MAU increase.
|
| Same goes for the OpenAI and Anthropic office announcements
| posted by the GP, these are sales offices with very little
| tech employment or outsourcing happening.
|
| Re "investments": these are also not what you think. I
| remember when Amazon was partnering up with schools in the
| US to provide "machine learning education" where said
| education was thinly veiled ads for managed ML services
| like Sagemaker and Rekognition. I wouldn't be surprised if
| the $3B investment from Microsoft was primarily free
| courses and certifications to cultivate a market, as well
| some annotation work (I know that Amazon has been hiring
| quite a few people to do this kind of work).
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in
| the same way he went after H-1Bs.
|
| Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let
| alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong
| software sector, but you might expect him to at least do
| another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing
| jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost
| tax revenue, by having developer salaries going to India rather
| than staying here.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Check out the HIRE Act.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Interesting - thanks!
| rs186 wrote:
| Looks like it's being pushed by a Republican senator
| without obvious support from the other side.
|
| I'm sure Google, Meta and hundreds of other companies will
| pay big $$ to make sure nothing comes out of it.
| sumedh wrote:
| > I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after
| outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs.
|
| They might use it for the next elections, all the white
| collar jobs are going out of US, they will bring it back if
| you elect them again.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy
| to move as much as possible to India
|
| Having dealt with A LOT of Accenture "devs", how do I leverage
| the barn and then some to short Google!
| boulos wrote:
| The article seems to hinge on the core assumption that revenue is
| much less than spending:
|
| > Those expenditures may be approaching $1 trillion for 2025,
| while AI revenue--which would be used to pay for the use of AI
| infrastructure to run the software--will not exceed $30 billion
| this year
|
| While it's clear that the author is summing up the spending from
| the big players, it's not clear to me that their math is right
| for revenue. Yes, OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines, SSI, etc.
| have pretty limited direct revenue (including zero!).
|
| But this comparison assumes no revenue growth for other top
| computing users. Some companies are certainly saving money on
| some tasks and increasing revenue, particularly in fields like
| customer support. See the confusing figure in section 5 of
| https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo... .
|
| That chart is by number of respondents and not weighted by
| revenue. Like the MIT study, it would not be surprising that
| "just pipe this to an LLM" isn't enough for most fields or
| companies. But a few have likely made material improvements.
|
| 10% of respondents saying they've seen a >10% revenue gain could
| be substantial, if they're bigger firms with high leverage in
| computing.
|
| Edit to add: the comparison also makes a classic "GDP vs market
| cap" style mistake. Capital expenditure has multiple years of
| useful life. Revenue is annual. You'd want to compare
| depreciation vs revenue.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Many are predicting the AI bubble will burst soon. Then we will
| see massive layoffs.
| shinycode wrote:
| Massive amounts of people with unsustainable lifestyle will
| stop consuming stuff. How will the whole capitalist economy
| continue to function with massive amounts of medium-high income
| people not having the same income anymore ?
| rvz wrote:
| It's complete market failure.
|
| By the time the AI bubble bursts, those that have investments
| in those companies would have already exited.
|
| Then in 10 years time, they will look back at how they
| scammed the back off of the layoffs with AI driving the
| entire problem.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| AI processing hardware deprecates (and depreciates) at a much
| faster rate than conventional CPUs, as much as 50% per year.
| Consider the billions being dumped into compute at that rate of
| depreciation and explain to me:
|
| 1. How will tangible assets generate profit net of near term
| capex requirements and interest on debt?
|
| 2. Why wouldn't payroll shrink as a result of the increased AI
| capabilities emerging from the capex spend?
|
| 3. If AI lives up to the hype & given recent news that public
| backstops are being requested, why shouldn't the US quasi-
| nationalize cash strapped players and distribute equity to every
| American?
|
| 4. As NVDA and AAPL local models and local compute eat into
| utility and base automation business, how do edge players
| maintain profitability without pricing capabilities well beyond
| the affordability of SMBs and individuals?
| zkmon wrote:
| So, jobs are being replaced by AI spending (not by AI), and AI
| spending is increasing because of AI, which means AI is replacing
| the jobs. Did I get wrong?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I suppose the distinction is worth making, since if it was
| actual AI replacing jobs, i.e. AI that is capable enough,
| today, to do someone's job, or more likely to increase
| someone's productivity so that headcount can be reduced, then
| that would seem a permanent shift and is only going to ratchet
| up.
|
| OTOH, if it is only dreams of AI, manifested as AI spending, or
| CEOs laying people off thinking that AI will soon (even if not
| today) be capable of backfilling them, then this may well
| backfire, and will be "reversed" if demand is less than
| forecasted and/or job-replacing AGI doesn't materialize, and
| all we get is productivity tools, useful mostly for a narrow
| band of jobs.
|
| Incidentally, I think Karpathy might be right that there is
| pretty much only one job that seems it actually could be
| replaced by AI today, at least potentially, which is call
| center tech support, or customer support, staff, who are
| dealing with a narrow domain and just reading off a script.
| zkmon wrote:
| Spending is happening only because, it promises to replace
| workers. And that possibility arises only because AI exists.
| Spending is only a means, not a cause.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but is the cause "AI" (here today, doing someone's
| job), or "promise of AI" (that may never materialize
| anytime soon, either in quantity or capability).
| rvz wrote:
| correct
| phplovesong wrote:
| Absolute garbage site. After all the popups it redirects to some
| general page. No sign of OPs arcticle.
| heywoods wrote:
| This article gets the phenomenon right but the causation wrong:
| it's not "AI spending vs. AI replacing jobs". both are happening
| simultaneously, and they're causally linked.
|
| The spending-revenue gap is real. Hyperscalers are projected to
| spend $300-550B on AI infrastructure in 2025[1] while generative
| AI revenue won't exceed $30-40B [2]. Amazon's capex jumped from
| $48B in 2023 to $84B in 2024 to a projected $100B+ in 2025[3],
| that's capital intensity doubling from historical norms of 11-16%
| to over 22% [4].
|
| But here's what the article misses: this isn't financial
| desperation. When Amazon's CEO announces 14,000 layoffs and
| explicitly states that AI will enable "fewer people doing some
| jobs"[5], he's revealing the strategic logic -- show me the
| incentives and I'll show you the outcome. Companies aren't
| cutting jobs despite AI spending; they're cutting jobs because
| they know AI spending will pay off.
|
| To be clear, the article treats the spending-revenue gap as
| evidence of irrationality. But infrastructure buildouts always
| precede revenue: railroads looked insane before they transformed
| commerce, electricity grids consumed massive capital before
| delivering returns, the internet required enormous infrastructure
| investment before creating trillion-dollar companies.
|
| What's different now is companies are pulling the future forward.
| If we take this article at face value which I can appreciate is a
| BIG "if" then AI is already automating 25% of tasks and
| delivering 10-55% productivity gains[6] so they're not waiting
| for AI to replace jobs organically. They're cutting headcount now
| to fund the infrastructure that will make those cuts permanent.
|
| More broadly, this is rational capital reallocation in a winner-
| take-all race. Companies that don't build AI infrastructure won't
| gradually decline, they'll lose competitive positioning entirely.
| That's why Meta is using off-balance-sheet financing for a $27B
| data center[7], why Oracle is borrowing $25B annually despite
| already carrying 450% debt-to-equity [8]. They're all-in because
| the alternative is obsolescence.
|
| The real story isn't "spending causes cuts" it's that AI
| infrastructure commoditizes human expertise, the complement to
| compute infrastructure. Companies are trading labor costs for
| compute infrastructure because they've correctly identified
| compute as the new moat. The job cuts aren't the price of
| spending on AI; they're the business model shift that AI enables.
|
| The article is right that we're not seeing mass AI job
| replacement yet. But the job cuts are happening in anticipation
| of replacement, not as an unfortunate side effect of spending.
| That's not desperation just business strategy.
|
| -- 1.(Morgan Stanley:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/morgan-stanley-hy...)
| 2. (Grand View Research:
| https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/generati...)
| 3. (CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/06/amazon-expects-to-
| spend-100-...) 4. (Cerno Capital:
| https://cernocapital.com/accounting-for-ai-financial-account...)
| 5. (CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/amazon-layoffs-
| corporate-wor...) 6. (PwC:
| https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/ai-...)
| 7. (Fortune: https://fortune.com/2025/10/31/metas-27-billion-bet-
| turns-ai...) 8. (The Register:
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/oracle_ai_debt/)
| hackandthink wrote:
| "they're cutting jobs because they know AI spending will pay
| off."
|
| They think they know.
| chongli wrote:
| They hope they know. They hope they're not in a bubble. It's
| the same hope that keeps people in a ponzi scheme.
| Tomcollins4 wrote:
| This misses the point. The expenditure is financed by stock
| price increases driven by retail enthusiasm. Meta hasn't spent
| 1 dollar in AI that it hasn't made in increased mcap. The
| moment that dries up all the data centers are cancelled. You
| don't play with the food you eat.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I can tell that editors doing CMS translations, marketing images
| have certainly been replaced.
|
| Likewise many tasks I used to do with Java, .NET, Node.js, have
| been replaced by low code/no code tools with agentic
| orchestration.
|
| Thinking that AI isn't replacing jobs is wishful thinking.
| csullivannet wrote:
| 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.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| 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
| the management layer, or AI isn't actually making workers more
| efficient.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It's true. Instead of talking about cutting jobs, we'd be
| talking about all the new companies building new things and AI
| itself wouldn't be the story.
|
| Instead we're still talking about cost cutting. Seems the
| market is not focused on investing outside the AI moonshot
| gamble.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| MCMA: Make Class-warfare MAD Again
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| I read in multiple somewhat off-beat sources lacking good info
| (in the sense "They did not back up their writings and don't
| enjoy an impeccable track record of such high regard that I will
| take their word for it", not in the sense "its known
| untrustworthy drivel") that the hiring rates in the US in
| particular for 'junior developers' is way, waaaaaaaaaaay down. As
| in, off a cliff.
|
| I wonder if that's true; I'm not in the US myself so I can't
| exactly just go have a drink in a place with lots of devs to try
| to find out.
|
| The reasons are somewhat obvious:
|
| * World economy in general and the US in particular is a
| rollercoaster, with the current administration being apparently
| dead set on flip flopping on every decision it makes, and always
| making extreme decisions. That's not a good time to invest.
| Hiring juniors is investing.
|
| * AI not necessarily replacing the jobs, but that's not actually
| relevant: AI has already torpedoed the general notion that 'if
| you have investor money you gotta spend just hire a bunch of
| folks; # of employees is the primary yardstick to check company
| size / success', whether AI works or not. If the boss tells a VP
| to 'use more AI to get a handle on hiring practices', then
| they're going to stop hiring juniors because it looks like you're
| outright refusing a direct order if you hire a bunch. _Even if_
| AI 'employees' are useless, you are strongly incentivized not to
| hire juniors in such an environment. Juniors _both_ lost the job
| opportunities stemming from companies just hiring folks because
| they have enough cash to do it and no good idea on where to spend
| it, _and_ the downside of looking like you aren 't on the AI
| hypetrain, if you hire juniors.
|
| * There's evidently been a rather massive push in particular
| during the previous administration to get folks from dead end
| jobs into IT, so there's now an overwhelming amount of junior
| devs, and many of them didn't naturally get drawn to the
| profession; they were told it's an easy way to get a steady job.
|
| * Even though there's some downturn/uncertainty, seniors/mediors
| aren't being fired because companies still remember how expensive
| and difficult it was to (re)hire dev teams post COVID. But that
| just makes the market for juniors even worse and makes it harder
| to hold out hope. When _everybody_ is getting fired, then once
| the economy is in better shape you stand a good chance. But that
| 's not happening; those mediors and seniors are continuing to get
| job experience whilst the juniors aren't.
|
| Those 4 combined: Sure, yeah, I can imagine your average junior
| dev's odds to get hired are at this point well into the single
| digits. But is that actually true?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| There is incredible norlmancy bias lately and hopium. Yes it does
| and yes it will much much more. Preface all writings with "yet"
| if you will.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I'd say the biggest problem is AI complacency, something like:
| "in the future our revenues will be the same but won't need any
| people". So, in order to prepare for this future the obvious
| course of action to do some layoffs and just chill for a while.
| The problem is, we don't really know when this future will
| happen. If it is soon, maybe companies are making the right bet,
| if not it is more like a deliberate choice to slow down. That's
| fine if one or a few companies choose this path as competition
| will correct the error. However, if they essentially all move in
| unison competition won't fix the problem and we'll have a self-
| inflicted economic contraction for no reason.
|
| The other factor is, will revenues really stay the same for
| companies once we have AGI / super intelligence? It seems value
| will not accrue to the companies that are in chill mode.
| johnjames87 wrote:
| Everytime automation replaced jobs the economies created by this
| replacement always created new jobs that replaced the previous
| ones. The USA has always been on the forefront of automating away
| jobs and it's unemployment rates show that new jobs were always
| created and that there was no long-term unemployment due to
| automation. AI won't be any different.
| throw234234234 wrote:
| We shall see. Most automations didn't automate the
| "controller/intelligence" part - they automated the actual
| task's labor (even if it was clicking for hours on a computer
| screen). Someone still needed to make all the decisions at
| every decision point. AI is fundamentally different if it
| approaches what AI proponents want; it surpasses human
| intelligence and has "agency/agentic".
|
| On a side note this is why I find proponents that state people
| with agency will thrive in the AI world puzzling -> isn't the
| whole point of "agentic AI" to have "agency"?
|
| With no advantage left (e.g. strength, intelligence, agency,
| etc) even if new industries come about why not use the AI for
| those too? Unlike previous industries where new domains needed
| more "brains" to drive/direct it, we have AI now. AI isn't a
| tool; it can for example deploy and can make decisions for
| itself. That's what the obsession with "agentic" is all about -
| replacing agency which at the moment was the very general
| domain that you still needed humans for.
|
| This strongly favors the economic means of production remaining
| that are still scarce (capitalism rewards the scarce, not the
| efficient). Land, capital, social connections/nepotism, etc.
| Logically people without these will be less economically and
| socially valued in general - I hope I'm wrong. The current
| productive class have the most to lose from AI.
|
| AI IMO breaks meritocracy and skilled based work long term
| assuming they succeed. Even if not in the next decade, and not
| the current crop of companies pushing it I'm sure AI will
| eventually cause this outcome.
| tamimio wrote:
| AI is just the scapegoat; otherwise we should see jobs like
| administrative assistant, legal, and medical replaced first. But
| I also think engineering is the worst field to get into. It's
| neither protected by a license like other white-collar jobs nor
| by a union like most blue-collar jobs. You end up overworked plus
| debt from school like white-collar workers but getting paid worse
| than blue-collar workers. And everyone's okay with that for some
| reason. Not a single organization is trying to change it. The
| government is happy with it, companies are obviously loving it,
| and on top of that, engineers are building the systems to replace
| them in a few years and they still think they are smart..
| fruitworks wrote:
| there's the PE license
| tamimio wrote:
| It's not mandatory, if an employer chose not to care about
| it, you won't find any legal issues otherwise in most
| engineering jobs, that's not the case in say nursing or legal
| work. Unless there's a regulation that requires any engineer
| should pass certain criteria as seen in other white collar
| jobs, then it won't be considered.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Software development is by nature a boom and bust industry,
| probably most like film. It's about creative and isosyncratic
| contractors picking up projects when they are available.
|
| What most people aspiring for a white collar career probably
| want is a job in IT - managing technology for business is much
| more stable than developing novel tech.
|
| If the thought of needing to move or lose a job strikes you as
| horrible, this is not a likely career path for you.
| tamimio wrote:
| Neither software development nor IT work is engineering work
| and shouldn't be considered one either. I am talking about
| engineering jobs, jobs that you went to school for 4-5 years
| in an engineering discipline, not a few weeks bootcamp or
| made-up program like computer science only to be called an
| engineer later, diluting the whole industry in the process.
| So yeah, software development might be boom and bust,
| engineering is not.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Yep. I'm talking about the software industry. Not working
| on planes for Boeing.
|
| > made-up program like computer science
|
| Sounds like you have a personal axe to grind. It's ok lots
| of people have undergrad EE degrees.
| evilduck wrote:
| The first civil engineering degree was minted less than 200
| years ago even though we've been building civil
| infrastructure works for millennia. There were plenty of
| mishaps along the way for that field too.
|
| The creation of the first digital computer is still within
| living memory. The state of the software industry and its
| maturity is doing ok given its youth.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| There is certainly pressure to spend money on and use AI tools. I
| know multiple people at different companies whose managers
| brought up low AI utilization in their reviews. This is, of
| course, really stupid but here we are.
| EricDeb wrote:
| American devs should support the hire act bill
| silisili wrote:
| 25% isn't nearly high enough. Seems more like a government
| money grab than an effective tool.
| qgin wrote:
| AI is absolutely replacing jobs though. I personally know
| multiple people whose companies have downsized departments or
| eliminated departments completely, offloading the work to fewer
| people using AI tools.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Here AI is more like a magic solution to stretch the employees
| you have. I don't know a single person who has been replaced by
| AI, but plenty of companies and government office hopes to be
| able to get more work done fast with AI. I doubt it will work.
| system2 wrote:
| Can you list a few tools that replaced jobs?
| qgin wrote:
| At a big hospital system, nurses call patients with complex
| medical issues and help organize appointments and tests and
| whatnot. Previously, they had about 20 people who would
| transcribe recordings of the calls and then write up
| documentation for the medical records. Now AI transcribes and
| writes the report and sends it to the nurse to sign off /
| make edits.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I've been seeing AI-based call center software replacing jobs
| in droves. This has affected my company negatively as well,
| since a good chunk of our own users are call center
| employees.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| re title
|
| I literally just said that on Reddit:
|
| "They [big companies] were already laying off lots of people and
| hoarding around 100 billion in cash. This has nothing to do with
| AI. The elites have been at that for some time for who knows what
| reason. If anything, they didn't start spending money until the
| AI boom.
|
| You could say AI is destroying jobs for a different reason. The
| leaders of the companies believe in gold rushes more than a
| steady stream of investments into forming and growing actual
| businesses. They didn't or don't believe America is worth
| investing in. They're simply about extraction."
| moominpapa wrote:
| Lost my previous job not to AI but to a pincer movement of
| Indians taking up positions here in the UK effectively forming a
| bridgehead to subsequently have the non-management roles
| outsourced to India. From purely my own anecdotal experience, I
| found my Indian coworkers very friendly when I could provide
| something, but once they had the whip hand their attitude was
| markedly different.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| They then get visas for the outsourced workers to bring them
| over. And I'm sure they get a nice backhander for arranging it.
| azan_ wrote:
| I think it's not even AI spending, but just the end of ZIRP.
| Animats wrote:
| From the article: "We have been following the slow growth in
| revenues for generative AI over the last few years, and the
| revenues are neither big enough to support the number of layoffs
| attributed to AI, nor to justify the capital expenditures on AI
| cloud infrastructure. Those expenditures may be approaching $1
| trillion for 2025, while AI revenue--which would be used to pay
| for the use of AI infrastructure to run the software--will not
| exceed $30 billion this year."
|
| Are the numbers really that bad?
|
| Google has been claiming that their cost per AI search query has
| dropped by over an order of magnitude.[1] They're presumably
| reaping the gains of not cranking up a really smart model on dumb
| questions.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-
| th...
| ultra_nick wrote:
| AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending isn't either. It's
| outsourcing and can be easily confirmed by cross-referencing H1B
| approval rates with layoffs.
|
| If you've been outsourced, ask your representative to support the
| HIRE Act: - Creates a 25% tax on outsourcing payments - Creates a
| "Domestic Workforce Fund" for apprenticeships/workforce
| development. - Prohibits companies from deducting outsourcing
| payments.
| klysm wrote:
| How do you prevent thin wrapper organizations that just
| contract out "services"?
| evilduck wrote:
| If we're hypothesizing, then the thin wrapper organizations
| should or would bear those same taxation and penalty costs
| when outsourcing and their prices would also be going up.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I'd say it's more "cost reduction" overall. And it makes sense to
| me. From my experience over the last few years, features are
| increasingly lower marginal ROI, and seem to take longer and
| longer to launch because the amount of coordination required
| keeps going up. Plus generally expected revenues in this economy
| are trending downward, so it only makes sense to reduce staffing
| and focus on only the highest priorities.
| yalogin wrote:
| AI spending is replacing jobs now but all of this spending is in
| preparation and anticipation of the real AI replacing jobs
| zerolayers wrote:
| Here's a fictional take on it, yet sadly based on real events:
| https://syntheticauth.ai/posts/synthetic-auth-the-power-prob...
| nsainsbury wrote:
| I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team
| (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful
| of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.
|
| And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's
| offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.
|
| IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the
| world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just
| tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the
| first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs
| (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating
| rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's
| happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK,
| etc.
|
| And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the
| jobs are ever coming back.
| j-bos wrote:
| At the fortune 500 I work at there's no sweeping layoffs that
| I've seen. There is a big emphasis on AI, but more relevant to
| the concerns, there are scoped hiring freezes for US workers, new
| offshore hires are greenlit though. And I can't help but wonder,
| what happens to a state when most of its critical infrastructure
| directly depends on another external state.
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