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Comment by Jenk | Hacker News Reader

$165k won't get you far on salaried engineers. There's every chance that 1 engineer, assuming Anthropic employs them, is on $500k or more. Assuming average of $336k in that pool of 50 engineers, then for 11 days for 50 engineers you've spent $710k[0].

Salary info: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software...

[0]The maths I used (posting because I'm tired and prone to mistakes):

    $336,000 / 260 (working days of the year) = ~$1,292.
    $1,292 * 11 * 50 = ~$710,769

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You don't need top engineers to port a program from one language to the other. Outsource it to India.

Of course, then you can also ask, could it have been done with a cheaper model. Probably yes. But then you wouldn't get free marketing.

I agree you probably don't need top-dollar bay-area engineers for this, but hardcore outsourcing to a LCOL probably isnt going to work either due to novelty and generally being setup to do the more rote thing (generalizing a ton here obvi). This feels like something in the middle.

Have you seen the "rewrite by outsourcing to India" thing work?

What a weird thing to say. The phrase “outsourcing to India” being used as shorthand for “you don’t need top engineers.” The nationality stereotypes are mean and degrading.

That's fair, I shouldn't have commented that. I don't like the national stereotypes at all - I see "outsource to India" as being more about less expensive engineers than not needing "top engineers".

That said, I don't think "rewrite from one language to another" with inexpensive engineers is a pattern that works. Happy to be proven wrong.

And at a macro level, often found to be accurate due to how the businesses in India operate. Poll the west's engineers: you'll find that engineering from India is not currently viewed very favorably, in general.

There are excellent engineers in India, but the system they operate in unfortunately doesn't allow them to shine.

Many of the large enterprises we work for did move software engineering work from HCOL locations in Europe or the US to India, often with disastrous results.

On Teams, channels related to AI are flooded with daily support requests from supposed engineers from India who clearly are not competent enough to set up GitHub Copilot or properly report issues they encounter during the setup.

And don't get me started on the shared libraries some teams located in India work on. If the library I need to use is full of obvious bugs where I wonder how any competent engineer could have shipped this to production, and then I see that the work has been moved to India, how am I supposed to feel about this?

Do we really need to sugarcoat this?

India has amazing software engineers and less competent ones.

USA has amazing software engineers and less competent ones.

Europe has amazing software engineers and less competent ones.

etc

You get what you pay for, pay top end in India and they will be same as top end in Bay Area (and many in Bay Area/USA are migrants...)

"weird" is a euphemism.

Outsourcing to India would actually be the disaster the naysayers were saying this would be.

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