Hacker News Reader

Comment by whiplash451 | Hacker News Reader

The author is doing the math the wrong way. For an extra $5/day, a 3rd world country can now pay an engineer $20/day to do the job of a junior engineer in a 1st world one.

The bitter lesson is going to be for junior engineers who see less job offers and don’t see consulting power houses eat their lunch.

View on HN

Yes, my thoughts at the end of the article. If the AI coding is really good (or will be really, really good) you could give 6 figures salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to a Bay Area developer, OR you give $5/d salary + $5/d in OpenAI credits to someone else from another country.

That's what happened to manufacturing after all.

150 dollars/month as salary won't get you no one from no country and if it happens to, the person will have so many things to figure out (war, hunger, political instability) that they would obviously not be productive.

Thing is, manufacturing physical goods mean you have to physically move them around. Digital goods don't have that problem. Timezones are what's proving to be challenging though.

100%. You can offshore "please write code doing X for me" but it's much harder to offshore "please generate value for my customers with this codebase" which is a lot closer to what software engineers actually do.

Therefore, I do not anticipate a massive offshoring of software like what happened in manufacturing. Yet, a lot of software work can be fully specified and will be outsourced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com