Hacker News Reader

Comment by RicDan | Hacker News Reader

Can sort of confirm that. Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now. Whilst there is some very obvious evaluations going on of replacing juniors with <insert your favourite llm>, it's quite obviously not there yet but management level interest is off the charts.

We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion.

Edit: speaking specifically about SWE-Jr. jobs

View on HN

))) Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now.

Once the next year of grads come, it is a wipe-out, because you now have multiple years of graduates competing for the same one position. Also, you often dont want damaged goods -- better to hire the fresh grad from this year's batch than a grad from 1 or 2yrs ago who has been unemployed.

the market is brutal

No counter point there. It's a real issue, and I don't know how to handle it. There is also an issue of the current world not being in a very investment heavy mood - unless you're talking military...

Well, in that case, if I may draw a stereotype, there’s a simple solution:

“If there’s a data breach, and a significant percentage of your programmers are offshore, penalties double.”

We all generally agree here that while some talent is excellent, the majority of companies outsource to the cheapest (or 2nd cheapest, just to be safe) option possible. Turn that into a calculated risk - if you hire a company and their sloppiness causes a data breach, that's on you with heavy penalties for negligence for not validating their work - not the company you hired.

Change the law so that if Bank of America hires Infosys, and Infosys outsources to some sweatshop, Bank of America is the one who must be directly held responsible for a failure.

We all wish that would be the real world - finally some good pressure to prioritise technical debt and issues. And some heads that would roll.

The stove must be touched, there's no other way

Agreed. And if it turns out there is no LLM riding in to rescue companies in need of new talent, the engineers who remain will be in very high demand indeed.

The delusion is the public’s belief they can ignore political action and everything will work out for them.

both major parties have sold out workers, the only real choice is the green party, workers' party, etc

The data disagrees. Here’s a graph of private sector spending on new factories in the US. 2020-2024 blows every time period out of the water since 1975.

Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON

Definitely agree. I blame educational institutions (I know, they can't do much without enough freedom + budget) for not advocating enough to our democratic responsabilities. I do wish we adapted some stuff from early history (Athens to be precise) - democratic participants got a very low base salary, and they also could vote to ban people from democratic participation (and hence the city) whenever they got too power hungry. Seems like a loss of responsibility allows too much incompetence to prevail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com