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> I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k

Yes you can. Life and business is not about profit. It’s about bettering the lives of people. Make it a priority to hire American because you’re an American company.

You’re making a choice to prioritize profit (or foreign countries) over the country that you benefit from. This is an immoral and short sighted business decision, as you will eventually see a backlash from the host countries you’re effectively operating as a parasite in.

Not trying to persuade you, just laying out there are alternatives that’ll be a reality eventually. Take a look at the current political swings in Japan, Restore Britain, etc.

Capitalism really is like a disease of the mind. The idea that you absolutely have to and there are no alternatives to extracting as much wealth from a system as possible.

>Life and business is not about profit. It’s about bettering the lives of people.

This mentality results in the grass at the Taj Mahal being cut with hand tools [0], or Japan having a whole category of "useless jobs" like elevator operators [1, 2] that simply exist to provide employment. Taken to an extreme, this is the broken windows makework fallacy. If I smash a lot of windows, the local glazier gets paid handsomely, at the expense of everyone who had to pay for window replacements.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wAH8jj9cm_o

[1] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2015/06...

[2] http://www.ageekinjapan.com/elevator-operator/

Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise? (I don't know, but perhaps you do). You seem to be strongly implying that this is in some way "wrong" rather than a subjectively different view of the purpose of human existence - for what reason? (I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims").

>Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise?

There are numerous studies that show menial labor leads to poor mental health. Perhaps these people employed as makework automatons are happier than they would be if they had no employment whatsoever and were destitute on the street, but these are not the only two alternatives.

>I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims"

The "victims" at the Taj Mahal/department store are the visitors/customers who have to pay slightly higher prices as a result. While not as extreme as the glazier in the broken window fallacy, the grass cutters/elevator operators exist on the exact same spectrum.

I think what leads to poor mental health is varied - poverty is definitely one cause, presumably one which is lessened in this case. I completely agree with you that there are more than two alternatives, but society seems unwilling/unable to consider any of the more radical.

You could frame those visitors to the Taj Mahal as victims, but that takes quite a narrow and short-term view of value to them. Would the Taj Mahal be as pleasant a place to visit if it were in an even more unequal and precarious society than it is? We all pay for things that don't directly benefit us through taxation (usually). The childless pay for schools, the car-less pay for roads, but we benefit from the society that having them creates. It seems hard to say that those visitors to the Taj Mahal would not benefit from being in a more prosperous and sustainable society.

Anything taken to an extreme is extreme, that includes capitalism.

We know that turning everyone and everything into a product has it's own set of negative outcomes. Trying to play this off as a binary situation is a form of extremism in itself.

There is already the term Bullshit Jobs [1] for service economies like the US where huge numbers of people are employed as part of company bureaucracy rather than representing the most efficient outcome.

Simply put trying to run a society like a business is going to ensure that you get such a large number of people unhappy that you start a revolution that tries to burn everything down and leads to a lot of death.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> You’re making a choice to prioritize profit (or foreign countries) over the country that you benefit from. This is an immoral and short sighted business decision, as you will eventually see a backlash from the host countries you’re effectively operating as a parasite in.

I have the vague sense we're far enough into e.g. offshoring that it's not purely about "profits" but about being competitive because all your competitors are doing the same thing.

But, then again, wealth inequality increase doesn't seem to be slowing (so profits /are/ being achieved), and I mostly think about businesses in robotics (and I don't spend that much time pondering it) where there's a lot of complexity in the stack, needing more "manpower", and being smart with money spent is maybe /more/ important. Robotics is a smallll sliver of software dev companies... (thus, "vague sense")

> business is not about profit.

Have you ever run a business? Literally all anyone cares about is profit. When I talk to potential investors, banks for loans, even the government for grants, all they're interested in is cash-on-hand, revenue, projections, and expenses. I have never once had a bank ask me if I was bettering the lives of my employees when applying for a loan.

I'm not saying it should be this way, or defending capitalism here, but until there's massive changes to the Western economic system... yes, businesses are about profit.

> Have you ever run a business?

yes

> Literally all anyone cares about is profit.

I would agree there's a lot of people that this is the case for

but it is not everyone

if my back was up against the wall I would rather shut down than e.g. dump PFAS into watercourses (3M style)

or fly-tip

or use AI

> I cannot justify hiring a mediocre new grad in Seattle for $120k who will end up using Claude Code anyhow when I can hire an early-career employee doing something similar in Romania or India for around $20k.

Of course it's not justified, but I don't think it has anything to do with Claude Code or AI. It has always been true that you can hire competent programmers from eastern European at a discounted price, since forever.

If you believe (whether if this belief is based on reality or not) American programmers have "better working ethnics," "easier time to communicate with," or "skin in the game," then they still have these traits in AI era. If you don't then you should outsource anyway.

It's also more than a little misleading to compare to the 2022 peak. Anybody who was hiring software engineers in 2020-2022 or being hired as one knows that was a wild and unsustainable period.

What, you mean a person who has only previous interacted with computers via smartphones taking a 6 month "JavaScript bootcamp" and getting a $150k/year salary on the other side isn't sustainable?

>>Brynjolfsson found a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, employment fell almost 20% from its 2022 peak

>This is confounding AI-exposed white collar occupations with occupations that were overrepresented with extended remote work.

Yup. If you look at Brynjolfsson's actual publication [0], you'll see that precipitous decline in hiring juniors in "AI-exposed occupations" starts in late 2022. This is when ChatGPT first came out, and far too early to see any effects of AI on the job market.

You know what else happened in late 2022? The end of ZIRP and Section 174, which immediately put a stop to the frantic post-COVID overhiring of bootcamp juniors just to pad headcount and signal growth. The problem with Brynjolfsson's paper is that it doesn't effectively deconvolve "AI-exposed occupations" from "ZIRP/Section 174-exposed occupations," which overlap significantly.

[0] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...

I am confused by your last paragraph. Is it AI or not? First three paragraphs sounded like it’s not…

It is not AI becuase employees hired in Romania and the US are both expected to be able to know how to use AI, which papers over performance issues in most cases that matter for a business (time to delivery), but I cannot justify hiring a deskilled NCG for $120k in the US.

Edit: cannot reply

> Why are then so many US developers still employed

Becuase unlike the HN hivemind, a large portion of experienced developers in the US have found ways to realistically adopt new technologies where they are relevant.

Reflexively being an AI fanatic or Luddite is stupid, but being a SWE who is able to tin recognize and explain the value of these tools and their limits is extremely valuable.

I can justify paying $300-400k TCs if you are not a code monkey. This means being able to architect, manage upwards, do basic design and program management, hop onto customer calls, and keep upskilling on top of writing and reviewing code.

We are not hiring SWEs to only push code. We hire SWEs in order to translate and implement business requirements into software.

A developer who has a mindset like that is worth their weight in gold, and there are still plenty of these kinds of experienced developers in the US.

Why are then so many US developers still employed? Some of them might be the best in the world, but they are a minority.

When I turn the brakes on my train why doesn't it stop instantly?

The other thing is that regulations and tax related employment agreements between corporations and local governments are designed to prevent some offshoring of workers.

It's not a binary situation.

Sounds as if the basic premise is that you’re hiring SWEs to deliver value to customers so that in turn the value of the company grows.

More people need to understand that.