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Comment by no1youknowz | Hacker News Reader

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well.

In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house.

There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc.

Of course, there will be a portion saying that we must keep our skills up to date. But not everyone can do heavy math, statistics, and ML. Just think of the developers who work on drupal, wordpress, javascript. What percentage do you think they can develop AI systems on tensorflow and neural nets?

A major shift is coming. As developers, we need to prepare.

Cue the cries for UBI.

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> There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc.

One of my clients is one of the largest multinational corp. in the world. They're excellent at getting things done, above average at remote work, and obviously have offices around the world. Their primary industry has a drastically changing demographic in the US which is prompting a hiring wave of younger people. They would love nothing more than to hire most of them outside of the US. The schools in several countries in Asia outperform the US in the necessary areas of study and they speak fine English. I'm not talking about India. My client is working very hard to make this a reality. They will eventually pull it off. These jobs are all very good paying white collar jobs. I'm telling you the middle class in the US hasn't seen the beginning of the devastation they are about to endure.

This is a trend that will continue until all labor is (as) equal (as an imperfect market will allow) no matter the geography. I see no trends (other than nationalism) that will make this stop.

And who will buy all the neat gadgets that they're producing? It won't be the US; no middle class means no disposable income. It won't be the Chinese; they make everything in house. It probably won't be anyone else in Asia because they'll just buy it from China instead.

Devastation of the middle class is about equivalent to devastation of the entire US economy. After we've willingly and successfully transferred all our manufacturing and engineering knowledge and processes to other countries... The only playing chip the US will have left is food exports.

What about Hollywood? And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business?

> What about Hollywood?

https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

Movie and music industry is in the "Information" labor category, which accounts for a whopping 1.8% of total employment... Oh, and Bollywood is already bigger than Hollywood. I don't see such trends reversing as we continue outsourcing CGI and other movie-making magic. There's nothing special about Hollywood that isn't able to be duplicated somewhere else.

> And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business?

These both almost solely benefit upper-class, and no one is arguing that they'll be just fine -- at least, for a longer period of time than everyone else.

Legal landscape in the US is just bad. Sue-happy country with convoluted taxes, horribly slow customs with crazy policies ("General Order warehouse", fml), 50 different states with different laws, taxes and regulations.

It might be that workers on a dictatorship will never have better conditions. The only way to reach an equilibrium is for the rest to lower their wages. Having no regulation is an illusion because dictatorships are heavily regulated and it is this regulation the one that takes effect.

Just doing the numbers from a stat standpoint, assuming you need to be in the top 2 percent of intelligence to code, there is a latent pool of 42 million developers in China/India waiting for their "go" signal. Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments, because capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.

> capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades

I don't think people realize how extremely true this is and how drastically different it will make the west look.

>Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of investments are referring to?

I'd follow the advice that kcorbitt gives in this thread. Index funds and if you have knowledge of a sector, save 10-20 percent of your investment budget for a specific stock you think will outpace normal growth. Finally, given the coming societal dislocations, I'd brush up on survival skills and stock some firearms.

Personally, I'm hedging my bets by living lean and investing every spare dollar while I'm making hay at potentially unsustainably high wages. I'm also continuing to develop myself professionally, and preparing to move to a lower-CoL country in the future if that ends up making sense. If everything goes well, I'll have the option to retire young and rich. If the world goes pear-shaped, hopefully at least one of those measures will turn out to have been a good investment!

This is pretty well-trodden personal finance advice.

When money is generally cheap and easy to come by, save instead of spend. When money is tight and hard to come by, spend. It's "buy low, sell high" applied to personal savings.

This is something to happen in latin america too. Here in Colombia (where I live) exist several attemps to build a solid tech scene, but failed by burocracy and lack of competent investors.

The smart people with money that come here can hoard all the good talent easy.

> capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.

I think this is true, and I think it will result in massive civil unrest. Economic landscape is not the only thing that will change.

It has already begun. I am eternally amused by the "shock" of self-proclaimed intelligent people at recent political developments. It is all quite rational, and quite predictable.

The true outrage comes from the super-rich, who are beginning to sense that their racket is about to be...disrupted. This is the roaring 20s all over again, except multiplied a thousandfold by technology.

Interesting times, indeed.

I think this is overestimating how qualified the coders are in the east compared to their western peers. Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. They said the education comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization, and the inability to handle scenarios not covered by that.

I'll be more concerned once leading technologies that are used by the rest of the world come out of China and not from the US.

Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.

Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm process Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.

> Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China.

I'm not surprised such comment came out from someone in Hong Kong but the truth is the education system in Hong Kong is even more "comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization".

Actually, most East Asian education systems have a heavy focus on "book knowledge, so just memorization". Lack of innovation? Just look at Japan.

Disclaimer: I'm from Mainland.

What the GP mentioned is much closer to regional bias/stereotype. In my opinion, it's all about how much alignment a group of people can have while gearing towards making/producing something better. Japan has way more alignment, while everybody else in the crowded Asia is busy with taking a slightly better position and showing off to neighbours. People truly enjoy this kind of feelings.

I don't think most of readers on HN can get and care about mainlanders' feeling of being somewhat offended in this case. So I just chuckled originally. But I hope my comment can supply some context.

Having been educated in America, I'm not so certain this doesn't describe my own experience as well, for the majority of my classes.

Aren't the top 1% chinese students/teachers aware of the problem and can do something about it ?

The top 1% send their kids to the West, and often move themselves as well.

"Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything."[1]

Sounds a lot like Feynman decrying the Brazilian education system in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman.

[1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

what exactly is the problem with this? a 50% pay cut is still a fantastic wage (globally relative). what exactly is wrong with the standard of living going up in other places while ours gets a little worse? also if the tech sector really loses half of it earning power the markets that cater to those people will simply deflate. globalization /is/ good in the long run because it brings supply/demand markets to an equilibrium. the problem is waiting for the equilibration.

The problem with this is people don't like to take a loss, they will never be OK with taking one. Whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant, they wont' like it(the cause) and will rant and rave and possibly "do something about it"(the effect).

tldr; people don't like pay cuts, whether it benefits someone else or not.

This is quite objectively true. Take a 50% paycut but along with that also cut down the cost of living. Something like Germany today, wages are smaller than in US but the costs of living make their citizens happy(er).

Then there will be less wage discrepancy compared to China and co and jobs start coming back.

Add in our need to reduce carbon output, locally produced products will have some advantage.

That's a lot easier said than done. I really have no influence on the cost of housing or food. So if I have a 50% pay cut, I'm probably not going to be able to live where I do.

I know, but it can start with bigger taxes on properties (and better zoning laws). People and investors should be stripped of the idea that buying a house provides a good return. Lowering the leverage when buying a house would also help push prices down. Foreign buyers should be taxed more to avoid speculators.

I don't think food is a problem though, western EU food prices are not smaller.

It's not good that comments like this against the group think are voted down. I certainly do not want my wages to go down, and I am not sure yet that globalization is good in the long run. When equilibrium is reached, in a world with infinite resources and space we would all benefit this is true. But in our current situation there will be more demand for limited natural resources if everyone is living at the same standard which will in turn lower my standard as a US citizen.

The greater effect on non ultra wealthy people now is the distribution of the wealth at the top for what is currently the outsourcing class, but is quickly becoming the machine/AI owner class.

Wages rarely go down, they just replace you. I'm mixed about wages going down. It generally points to cost of computing and developing going down, so it may discourage holding traditional jobs down and encourage people to do more creative things because computing is cheaper.

"so it may discourage holding traditional jobs down and encourage people to do more creative things because computing is cheaper."

It's hard to do creative things when you have to work the gig economy all day to barely afford a cardboard box to sleep in at night.

If expenses fell at roughly the rate of wages things would be roughly-ok. But the costs of housing, healthcare, and higher education keep going up. Globalization has pushed down the cost of many manufactured goods for Americans but it's not an even trade if nice TVs go from $3000 to $800 while a year of college goes from $8000 to $16000. The cheap-ish stuff getting a lot cheaper can't quantitatively offset big middle class expenses getting even modestly bigger.

To be clear, I'm not saying that globalization is the cause of big-ticket items like healthcare getting more expensive. I am saying that globalization has not depressed big-ticket expenses along with the prices of manufactured goods and middle-class American wages. Many middle-class Americans are experiencing a real decline in material standard of living concomitant with globalization. If equilibration toward a happy new equilibrium takes decades, I don't think that political realities will permit the equilibration to take its own sweet time. Something will rupture first. Maybe it already has ruptured with the election of Trump.

"a 50% pay cut is still a fantastic wage (globally relative)."

I'm not interested in relative to global. I'm interested in relative to where I live. Cause, you know, that's where I have to pay rent and buy food.

I think it's actually going to be a trough. You have the creative frontend devs that are a mix of engineers and artists that make intuitive UIs. and the highly skilled ML/AI/PHD/Masters western educated engineers that will probably still be highly competitive. The ones hit the hardest will be your standard line engineer, the "Java Spring API" maintainers devs who just take tables from a DB and expose them as json blobs, write data feeds etc. This can easily be outsourced for much cheaper, and requires almost zero cultural knowledge, and is the bread and butter of any business.

>Cue the cries for UBI.

$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even with that, people would still work massive hours to obtain the best house on the block.

But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.

How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?

I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.

This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!"

I think the thing that folks keep missing is that technology isn't a zero sum game. So what if there are a shitload of people in the east doing programming cheaper? 9/10 of the 'type' of programming they're doing is grunt work that no one really wants to do anyway.

Will some people feel the 'crunch' from this? probably, in the short term. But technical acumen doesn't sit still. We're not all languishing on our laurels with technology from the 90s while the Chinese are gearing up for total war.

A much BIGGER problem, IMO, is our social policies tending towards overt xenophobia. THAT is what will kill the US and the Western European countries if we don't get off of this nationalist bandwagon that we find ourselves on.

>This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!"

And it will -- as it already ate lots of service and call center jobs. But these things take time, and India's schools are not exactly best of class.

china is the most racist and nationalist country in the world and they are doing just fine.

Why is the US and Europe the only places that have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of globalism?

Why do China and Japan get free passes while anything done in the west to protect citizens interests is decried as xenophobic?

I think it's not xenophobia, the biggest problem is actually wage inequality. It s quite suprising that the US, with all its prosperity (gdp per capita) doesn't have a huge safety net, on the contrary. Meanwhile US corporations and individuals, same ones that outsourced the jobs, have more cash at hand than you can pronounce.

I sometimes believe it lacks a bit of socialism.

Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine.

I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.

Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.

Sure, if you're looking for a 'pile of JS' at the end of it.

Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me.

If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done.

It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.

The last 3 jobs I've had is to rearchitect a badly written non scaleable, brittle system, with no unit tests to one that was better architected with automated testing. They tried to get away with cheap (domestic) coders and people who were at the company for 20 years.

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