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Comment by akokanka | Hacker News Reader

It's not just Cobol that gets moved to India almost all dev is being moved there. When you get decent Devs for 45 buck's a day, there's no need in others.

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This is mathematically untrue as ought to be obvious by the mere fact that other devs exist. There are more work needing good devs than good devs in the world let alone just India thus even expensive labor finds a market.

This is cope. It is clear that software engineering in the high-paying West is moving out to India, Eastern Europe, Latin America.

The days of the irreplacable, highly paid software engineer who does the bare minimum are over

Why is there year on year more software developers in the US? When manufacturing jobs moved to China we didn't see manufacturing jobs increasing simultaneously in both markets.

You invoke emotionalal thinking while my statements are purely factual. Show me your numbers.

More software developers in the US does not exclude the possibility that there are also more developers in India, actually even more than in the US. My company has a presence in India, and it is noticeable that the company in general is favoring hiring in the India -- entire teams gets built in India, and headcounts are first given to Indian teams and then US teams

Sure, and now entire teams are being replaced by ChatGPT. My advice to American and Indian students: don’t bother studying computer science or getting into software engineering.

Odd advice. You could do far worse in terms of degrees...

No, don’t bother. Go into medicine or mechanics or something similarly high paying but without threat of outsourcing or AI replacement.

So we should only tell people in India to learn software engineering? Like how we moved all our factories to China? I'm sure this will all go super well.

Nobody replaces whole teams with ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't exactly work alone. They at best replace larger teams with smaller teams with better tools. More realistically the same size teams can now accomplish more. If I can date myself the person gluing chatGPT code, their own code, and the company codebase will be Dilbert not the pointy haired boss.

It excludes the possibility of jobs "moving" to India if both are growing that statement is just wrong.

For the last 30 years every dev job that could be offshored has been offshored.

Now there is an issue; the salaries in India have not caught up - but they have come up a lot. The infrastructures in India bit a lot of people hard in the arse over covid and a lot of credit was lost there. Also political issues are looming large for people doing offshoring. You might have been very optimistic about the dev shop you've opened in the Ukraine, but that was then.

It's still a true observation. I have never ever worked in a company that has had enough onshore devs to do the work that is urgent and of high value. Never. When that changes I'll be concerned about software salaries.

Any “decent” dev in India will simply take the H1B train to America if they’re being paid $45 a day.

You might want to look up how increasingly complicated it is to "take the H1B train". There is a lottery process where one has <10% of chance of getting selected in the "general" category. And many companies don't actually have this process of sending you directly to US -- you need to spend years to get a degree from a US institution and find a job just like people from other countries. It is nothing "simple". Do your research.

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