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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

What if this turns into rust belt but for software? Once high paying jobs gone with AI, politicians trying to please grumpy software developers promising them to open a software shop and create jobs. Mostly college drop-outs, voting for a certain party that promises to take on AI :)

Half kidding of course, but AFAIK many industries went through such a transformation and today most social and political issues stem from those areas that once were affluent lost their industries. Why not the software too?

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We are giving India the IT market, just like China got manufacturing.

It's precisely this. Trump is allowing one of the last vestiges of the American middle class to be outsourced to India. Just like Clinton allowed the same to happen with factory jobs to China.

As a person of color this is even more detestable.

At least we will be able to get jobs putting plastic forks in boxes now. Maybe we will be able to use those green GitHub tiles to negotiate better pay.

As a person of grayscale the contrast is undeniable.

You Grayscale people have it easy, at least you have contrast. As a person of Transparency I end up overlooked everywhere all the time.

Actually it was Nixon who single-handedly pushed manufacturing to China, and Reagan who pushed harder.

Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.

IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.

not my downvote btw

Right, it was Trump who allowed IT services to be outsourced for the last two decades.

I mean... yeah? Tim Cook and Trump were documented buddies in the first term of his presidency. No over-the-table attacks over offshored manufacturing or outsourced services. They probably celebrated the demise of Intel over a filet mignon and Coca-Cola while discussing the merits of lower manufacturing margins.

The idea that now Trump (or anyone, for that matter) wants to bail-out American chipmaking is laughable. Intel bet wrong, and now all of America has to satisfy itself with being critically reliant on Taiwan for our highest-margin products. You don't have to blame Trump, but there's no reason any corrective action shouldn't have been done during the first term. We either let Intel drown or send them a government-issued life raft - we can't teach them to swim from underwater.

"No More Offshore. Startups Look to Spend and Hire in U.S. Due to Trump Tax Change."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-startups-hiring-us-workers-30f...

I don't understand how Trump is allowing anything with headline like this.

The BBB fixed some previously dire flaws in how tax law treated spending on software salaries in the US.

Create the problem. Fix the problem. Win!

The other side did have 4 years to fix it, though.

I do wonder if the last election would have gone differently if all the people directly and indirectly affected by that hadn't been.

> The other side did have 4 years to fix it, though.

They did try, incorporating some relief into a bill in 2021, however:

> In the House version of the Build Back Better Act passed in November 2021, the effective date for the amendment made by the TCJA to Section 174 was delayed until tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. While this specific provision of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support, comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) in late December indicating his opposition to the bill effectively stalled progress on the Build Back Better Act, making the path forward on legislation unclear.

-- https://www.bdo.com/insights/tax/significant-change-to-the-t...

That bill did narrowly survive, but only in a stripped-down form with that Section-174 provision removed to satisfy the Senate fence-sitters. Manchin later left the Democratic party.

And as a white person it’s even more detestable still.

Since skin color somehow matters /s

Worse because we're giving it to India in the US.

I've been saying this on HN since 2022:

For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?

For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.

Our company only uses teams in eastern europe. The cost is 1/3 the salary of someone in the US.

Remote work during covid improved remote management and communication, which is needed to fully outsource workers.

I live in Canada and most skilled developers self-sort into the American market as it's a 2x salary differential.

Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.

I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.

It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...

Canadians self-sort into the US because of money. If they could earn the same amount working from Canada, almost none would pack up their lives and move to a new country.

I don't think it's this simple. Maybe it would be for larger corporations that would rather hire more cheap staff than fewer quality staff. You shouldn't have this issue if the company values the experience the staff has instead of just looking at them as an expense.

I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.

Any hints on which company this is?

https://facepunch.com/careers

So bizarre to hear stuff like this said as if it's a future hypothetical.

Outsourcing dev work to India because it's "cheaper" has already maximally happened since decades ago.

So if your theory was correct there'd be almost no western developers by now. And yet there they are, making half a million a year working for big tech in California.

The only way your position can pass even a basic sense check is that you mean you think these companies are paying 5x just to see their devs in person?

A (large) fraction of software development is outsourced to India for years if not decades but it jumped with the end of ZIRP. Outsourcing has downsides but the difference of salaries is also a part of the equation.

It'll be interesting to see the affect of AI on this. My guess is it'll actually reverse the pattern somewhat since the amount of manual work is reduced and thereby the premium on fast and clearly-understood comms has increased.

Hard to predict. In the areas I know well LLM don’t improve my productivity that much but they allow me to do something in areas I don’t know well e.g. write code in an unfamiliar language (likely bad code but sometimes that better than nothing). So maybe juniors + LLM will replace middle level developers.

Job market is better for seniors right now but that’s mostly because employers can sometimes hire a senior for money they would pay to a junior during late COVID boom.

Yes, but the claim `aurareturn made was that it was for the WFH/remote people being remote, and not as a function of ZIRP ending

Remote work increases the percentage of jobs that can be given to people living in other countries. It’s not that 100% of jobs can be outsourced.

Every software job I’ve had for over a decade has had at least one employee on the team working in a different office or from home. Frequently different time zones. This was already a reality and as the other guy in the thread said, we’ve already seen maximal outsourcing.

>So what if the guy works night and sleep days

is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of

Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve

The fact that only one member was remote caps the remote availability.

I feel like this supports my theory.

Nowhere in my story was there the implication that there was only 1 remote employee at that time because there was a cap on remote employees.

You also get into the grey area of if it counts as a remote team if every member of the team is located in a different regional office.

It has been a gradual change.

> already maximally happened since decades ago

We just laid off ~4000 employees and are replacing them with hiring in India. Your notion that it already happened decades ago is wrong.

Nope, this is a well known pattern. Western startup, grows, matures, MBAs take over, all they can do is look at cost numbers because they can't value anything, so send all the jobs to lowest bidder overseas, look at this sudden jump in profits! Surely we now all deserve fat bonuses. Get those bonuses, quietly move on to other jobs, company enters descent phase, new startups have since started eating into their markets, they've no way to respond because they're corpse-companies, slowly get consolidated and cannibalized and Toys-R-Us-d into the ground.

Cycle of life continues

Whether you work from home or not does not change the fact that the work can be done remotely. You think your boss values the watercooler chitchat so much they would really pass on hiring someone at 1/5 of your salary working harder than you?

The return to office mandates were mostly a power play and a cost saving measure.

Why does Google hire anyone anywhere for half of their positions, when they could just literally not hire anyone and get the same amount of production code without wasting everyone’s time? It is absolutely not as simple as you seem to believe.

I also have been saying this and was shocked to see that US developers demanded WFH instead of actively trying to stop it becoming a thing. I was trying to understand what makes them believe that their company will pay them 5 to 10 times more money to sit in front of a computer somewhere outside the company rather than someone who is in the other side of the world.

USA based ones have some advantages, like the timezone and the familiarity to the culture but both of these things are actually fixable and when fixed it saves a lot of money. I came to conclusion that US based developers must be thinking that they are better than everyone and that's why they are being paid these salaries.

The space I work in, which I don’t plan to leave, is hardware/software/embedded. I am hybrid, and sometimes I go in twice a month. When trying to integrate hardware into a system over a software interface (CAN, various serial, i2c, eth, etc) I am on-site daily.

Then integrating a whole subsystem into the actual product, same deal. I spend as much time holding a wrench or a meter as I do writing code.

This is very hard to outsource.

I skipped the whole webdev movement. Closest I got was using Wt (C++) to make an engineering interface for a system once, so non-engineers could actuate relays and devices.

I do think I’m better than most people at this. I don’t think it can be outsourced, and I am not concerned.

People can argue about the latest js framework or how amazing rust is for the next 15 years, at which point I plan on retiring.

This type of work is largely recession-proof and offshoring-proof.

It's my experience that US developers have always been better than developers from India, hands down.

If it can be done more cheaply then some competitor will do it and kill your business that doesn’t. Either find another competitive edge (be better or convince somehow the customers that you deserve the premium you ask for), or do what Trump does, introduce tarrifs for imports and cutoff the more more efficient companies from reaching the local market. And of course pay the price for it.

The rust belt can't really fall back on tourism like California can. Worst case scenario all software jobs evaporate and it becomes Florida with better weather

LA has a highly diverse economy, it’s really only the Bay Area that has diversification issues.

The rust belt actually does quite well with tourism, though my research for responding to your comment seems to indicate to me that tourism is important everywhere.

Back in the 90s, it was the opposite as miliary/aerospace declined in SoCal.

I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.

I’m over in the rust belt and all I hear about California these days is it’s full of homeless people and crime that goes unchecked. It’s not looking as appealing as a vacation destination as it did 20 years ago. Maybe this perception doesn’t match the reality you see living there, but when it comes to attracting tourists, perception is everything.

It's really hard to reply without making a statement on politics but you really should diversify your news consumption.

I can only assume you think I’m watching Fox News all day. Here is an article from CNN[0] which talks about the significant number of stores closing in a popular tourist area, and while they try to explain all the reasons for it, homeless people (sorry, “unhoused populations”) and crime are still mentioned. It also mentions California has 30% of the counties unhoused, which is way higher than I thought it would be and paints an even worse picture than the one I had.

This article is a couple years old, so maybe things have started to turn around from the investments that were made, but reputations take time to change, as good news doesn’t get reported on nearly as often as bad news.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/business/san-francisco-union-...

Unfortunately, if you live in a different country, it’s quite difficult. The only news coming from the USA are the shocking ones. All news organisations are like this. I didn’t hear anything else about for example California in the past decades in European news, just these:

- Schwarzenegger - Homelessness - Fires

Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.

And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.

But of course that’s true for every single country.

Unlike Florida, a state known for its orderly and mannered citizens. I think CA will be fine

I'll take "lawless" California over seeing the same Rankin cop watching a stop sign at the entrance to Braddock in order to write "rolling stop" tickets every 15 minutes. I also like that I don't have to worry about a police chief holding me at gunpoint because the fire alarm happened to go off while I was alone in a warehouse space that I was renting.

I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.

There are plenty of dying places in the desert and on the beach tourists can visit, it's just the "dying places" part that makes them aversive to tourism.

Everywhere has a boom-bust cycle. The question is just on what timeline. It typically takes decades to happen. When is anyone's guess.

Not always. Some industries just never come back. Where is the oil lamp or camera film industry now?

The lamp industry didn't go anywhere. The Camera industry didn't go anywhere. Might as well be saying, where has the CRT monitor or Macromedia Flash industry now?

I think defining industries this narrowly isn’t helpful

Haha so true. Though I feel for this to happen the cost of building software products has to be high. With manufacturing your average mechanical eng grad cannot build something and sell (factories' costs etc) out the gate.

With software any body can build and put something out there (ignoring quality and tech debt and taste etc). Where software might go the way of manufacturing is when price of ai actually reflects hardware costs (my estimates of the realistic Claude max pricing at cost is between 7-10k and month). Now put together other structures that will come up to "industrialize" ai+software software may not have easy entries sadly.

> What if this turns into rust belt

We're rewriting the belt.

Ah ha!

> Why not the software too?

Would it be any worse than the Dot-com bust?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

Literally no jobs are going away due to AI.

I've lost consulting work because I'm a lot more expensive than $20 a month. I've literally had clients say, "yeah, I would have called you, but I was able to figure out that bug with ChatGPT."

Once the bugs stack up, they'll call you back and it will be lots of billable hours. At least, that was the case for me; only took a few weeks before the clients own inconsistent requirements bite them in the ass. Gotta have a business+tech expert to make many products. AI is neither; and many folks can't prompt for shit (and can't spec for shit; and can't test for shit).

Not to discredit anyone else's experiences, but I have one client, who admittedly has gotten pretty good at "vibe coding", and he has been tasking me with all kinds of stuff that would have probably remained just as idea.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI. I don't like that I have to use it sometimes, and I think we were better off without it, but so far it hasn't hurt me. It's definitely made me way less employable in the traditional sense. I feel sorry for the new grads/self taught people trying to get jobs.

That an interesting perspective, about working on a lot of your client's vibe coded fever dreams. Yeah, I'm don't envy 19 year olds looking for software work right now. God help them.

Well, I moved into a more conservative role, which I think was a good move considering the economy and the job market.

This is easily, demonstrably false. The Washington Post ran an article over 2 years ago of specific, documented instances where people lost their jobs due to ChatGPT: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...

As per your article:

“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”

I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.

There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI

Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.

When a manager prefers AI over a proven-performing employee, I would expect a lot if times it is becuse the AI is more intelligent than the manager, not the employee.

Looking at things in the micro scale and expecting it to translate directly into a macro scale is stupidity.

Maybe you should say that directly to the grandparent comment who did that.

Sure, in total probably there will be even more and better jobs. Just like with the auto industry or the other industries that turned from producing stuff into designing stuff and telling to Chinese to produce it like this.

That's not the whole picture. There are less positions available where you tell someone else what to do and more competition for those positions.

Define “jobs.” A lot of the “jobs” created by offshoring production involved being service workers for the 25% of knowledge workers who benefit from offshoring.

AI has already replaced thousands of jobs. Plenty of stories about that appear on HN. Plenty of anecdotes from people who have lost work or clients to AI. People here have stated their intention to fire their entire workforce and replace them with AI as soon as possible. AI companies have put up billboards saying "stop hiring humans." A single Google search would disabuse you of this notion.

I don't understand being this willfully naive, especially if you support AI, because using it to replace jobs is the entire selling point. No company wants AI for any other reason, and every company wants AI.

Of course there will be. There will be instances where a company has 4 people working in a role but with AI 2 people can do the same job and they can therefore let 2 people go. (and then there will be other places where even more jobs are created because of AI).

This is just an admission you don't know where work comes from. Like you think there's a fixed size of pie of work.

If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.

You are assuming human resources are hired based on budget only instead of need. Your assumption is: "we have 400,000$ to spend on something. Oh okay let's spend them on hiring 4 engineers at 100k each" and with AI they just happen to be as efficient as 8 engineers. Yay. They'll just do more things.

This might be the case at startups.

For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go". In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.

How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

> How do you square your comment with the fact that companies routinely engage in mass layoffs when they are profitable already?

Not op, but…

Just because a company is profitable doesn’t mean that they make good decisions around hiring.

Art jobs got destroyed everything else AI was just a excuse

The word “literally” is doing a LOT of work here.

"Jobs going away due to AI" really tracks two different outcomes:

- The type of job is eliminated due to AI

- The amount of people doing a type of job is substantially reduced because AI increases the productivity of people in that role and companies can do the same amount of that work with less people

I think the former is extremely limited so far, but the latter is pretty substantial. I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the people that did probably did so to reject the former argument.

The most common one is simply we wanted to cut heads and used ai as an excuse. Also AI spend is probably a huge drag on a lot of companies that are getting nothing off value but burning a lot

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