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Comment by everlier | Hacker News Reader

I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.

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The outsourcing is the only real threat in your list. In the past, we have eliminated jobs in the primary (eg farming) and secondy (eg manufacturing) industries through automation and outsourcing with the goal of moving workers into higher level industries, including tertiary industries (eg software). If we are outsourcing tertiary industry jobs as well, what does that leave us?

The US outsources something like 300k jobs annually, with over half of these being IT jobs. Adding 10k IT jobs per month could change the employment numbers and economic outlook we've been seeing lately. It seems like we're in a race to the bottom. I do think AI will make things worse, economically at least, with the reduction in jobs. But this could be offset by policies promoting on-shore employment.

It leaves us nothing :)

For those who are young, single, and are open to adventure, the endless outsourcing provides another option: pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely. There are plenty of places where you can get a fraction of a US salary while living a quality of life beyond what the US offers. US companies have return to office mandates so they can fire US workers. But if you're a US citizen living abroad and willing to accept 1/4th the salary of a person in California (and living in a place with 1/10th the living costs), companies get the best of both worlds: an employee they feel they can trust while also undercutting wages. Yeah, it sucks for people still in the US, but it's been great for me.

"pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely."

The lower cost domestic areas still can't compete with the labor cost of low cost countries. Most low cost countries have tradeoffs when it comes to rights and freedoms enjoyed in most developed (high cost) counties.

Incredible comment. I live on biz side of insurance but use tech/automation skills all the time. My industry should have solved so many problems so many years ago.

But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy people are about learning and adopting them"

Except in other industries it is usually the lazier people who got the power to fix the things as they were like 30 years ago. While in IT they got washed out quickly.

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