Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilfred | Hacker News Reader

the execs are just salivating to commodotize us. my experience with outsourcing tells me we are fine.

It's fine right up until it isn't. The chance that "this time it's different" can't even be reasonably inferred from the inside.

Induction from the perspective of the seasonal turkey: https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-i...

If offshore humans can't beat on shore humans what chance does AI have in the near future?

The “paradox” (or whatever you might want to call it) with software is if I can describe the business case, with all of its side effects and outputs for unhappy paths, in enough detail, I’ve just done all the hard part of writing software. If AI can help with that last 20ish percent then great. The challenge with offshoring, and now LLMs, is that it takes as much time to describe the problem and outputs than it doesn’t to just write the dang code.

It is rare to ever see a software project with all behaviors spelled out in English. I think the effort required to do that is rarely necessary, and people just write code instead. "Documentation" usually means that you wrote down how to use the thing, plus some non-obvious details.

If I could predict that, I could beat the market. Inventing the difference would be both a fun technical challenge and a way to get a terrifying lynch mob at my door. Merely knowing how far away it is would help me know how to plan early retirement (kinda already could except for being a migrant).

Exactly. It’s always been possible to commoditize software engineering _if_ you could find the right developers overseas but the fact is we are where we are because it’s hard and almost impossible to manage.

And either way, talented developers from developing countries are often brought on with visas and end up with salaries close to the industry norm. I’ve been involved with large mergers with overseas dev teams and that’s how it’s always been.

At best, AI is just good documentation. This whole craze is the equivalent of saying doctors won’t be necessary because you can just google how to do x procedure.

If they commoditize us, then they will have commoditized themselves.

Right. By the time I’m automated we pretty much have AGI.

Executive isn't a "job", its a status, its not a skill, its just a position in the hierarchy, so no they will not have commoditized themselves

Being an executive totally requires skills. Are they unique skills that only executives have? Not really. But people management and resource management in general require skills, wisdom, etc. If someone is made an executive and they don't have the required skills, they will usually blow up their project or company.

I don't doubt that an executive requires a certain temperament that lots of people don't have and that the people who become executives are generally intelligent and capable. What I'm saying is that it is not a "trade" or "profession" that has specific teachable skills, knowledge bases and responsibilities like "engineer" or "lawyer" or "plumber"

There totally are specific teachable skills involved with being an executive, although they are abstract for the most part. Above all an executive should have an adequate understanding of the thing they manage. But resource management, estimation, accounting, public speaking, knowledge of relevant laws, workplace psychology, etc. are all skills that executives need and can be taught. If you meet an executive with these skills and then meet one without them, you'll know what I'm talking about. I would also say the same of sales jobs, but sales is relatively narrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com