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Comment by jalapenos | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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