The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI
economist.com
economist.com
"Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe. Some of this is done at so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India and also now growing in the Philippines."
It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".
I think as well there is currently the following: AI still needs an operator, in the same way than a bulldozer needs a bulldozer operator. And like with bulldozer, there are always something that business stakeholder wanna dig, now that digging is faster.
How is this HIPPA compliant? Please tell me there’s an aspect of HIPPA that requires sensitive data to be only accessed and processed by Americans on shore. You’d think the multiples we pay on health care for worse outcomes would at least be supporting our own domestic middle class with this sort of basic back office white collar work
Also though, I don't think there is anything inherently less secure about a Filipino handling my data than an America
If you are an American or European with colleagues in India, and if they are working or attending meetings after regular work hours, they don't have good WLB. Given a choice, I doubt they would want to attend the late night meetings. Life in India is already like playing a video game in hard mode, and yet we have to work lot more hours for lot less pay, and be regularly told how shitty offshoring work is.
[1]https://www.news18.com/viral/26-year-old-ey-pune-employee-su...
[2]https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/it-employe...
This was what I believed, then I saw how pretty much ALL of my friends at Fortune 100s or 500s and they were amazing. I am sure awful companies exist and the bar for what is good WLB can be lowered by these, but the whole "it is bad everywhere" was simply not true and I felt I had a distorted vision of my Indian friends until I actually visited a lot of them.
My so works at a reinsurance company in one of these GCCs, and her WLB is unmatched. Hours are really flexible. Has a really great manager and team. She even gets to take a day off every month as menstrual leave.
> work lot more hours for lot less pay,
This depends, while the vast majority of roles pay "market rate" there is a strange sweet spot where roles pay a significant amount considering purchasing power and cost of living.
From https://theprint.in/opinion/indias-poor-little-rich-people/2...
"The purpose of life of an Indian is to escape India, it can either be done by leaving India physically or figuratively by shifting to a gated community. Once the Indian escapes India, India becomes the best country in the world & requires no improvement".
"By walling themselves away, India’s rich secede from society. If the elites don’t use public services, there is less pressure on the state to improve them."
Oh dear
> https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/publications/winners-and-l...
Surely, AI helps them do stuff even cheaper, and cheap is good, so their business should be booming?
On other hand companies getting these services cheaper can mean that they have less pressure to increase prices.
I think whole Jevon's paradox is misapplied. More efficient use of coal leads to more use cases as they become profitable. Which there was lot of. With many other things like writing or translation there might not be more use cases.
I can now translate tasks that can be easily split to low cost regions, and not have to deal with the cultural issues of India. I can also rapidly generate work of similar (and improving) quality... I have no use for a meat-proxy to a llm.
I expect a severe crash in the Indian tech sector, before a minute proportion of the workers can start to build it up again.
The only report that I know of that is available is the ICRIER report.
I haven’t read the report itself, but it’s supposed to show modest hiring growth.
Conversely I know that most of the outsourcing vendors are seeing reductions in headcount when it comes to outsourced tech operations.
So, insurance claims are handled by people who operate in different legal system and by unaccountable undererministic system. And people are pressured to perform fast.
This is not about "automating complex task". This is about "create accountability sink for fraud we want them to do and create system that will perform said fraud".
Also, pretty sure denial of coverage letters have to be endorsed by US licensed doctors and pharmacists, at least in any half decent state.
At the same time, we are reducing the proportion of outsourced work, because a local team with LLMs are dramatically more capable... There so many benefits to how you can organize a smaller high-skill team. I would put a 10-man team with the current tooling on par with a 10 high skill + 80 low cost heads even 5 years ago.
I think that two arent as different as you believe.
The only time that works if you have no assets or presence in the US, or I guess you have an in with the US president.
It is super hard to build class cast action and suing companies for denied insurance claims is also quite hard - and super expensive. Besides, the current management dont need it to go on forever, they just need it to go on for now. If company gets to pay fine 20 years later and you already pocketed the bonuses and salary, why would you care?
The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.
But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.
Longtime subscriber. Pretty disappointed in how biased their coverage is.
The most critical piece they have put out on AI is oh no it's so powerful it's hacking everything. It's like being in a job interview and saying your biggest weakness is you work too hard.
>The most critical piece they have put out on AI is oh no it's so powerful it's hacking everything. It's like being in a job interview and saying your biggest weakness is you work too hard.
What do you think they've missed? Otherwise, all you've demonstrated so far is "their stance on AI doesn't match mine", not that they're "biased". If I was reading HN 5 years ago it would be people saying how economist is biased for or against crypto because the most critical/supportive piece doesn't say it'll go to 0, or will replace all of finance, respectively.
But, for me it's not so much that it doesn't match my view. I'm honestly mixed on the whole thing (I am probably most concerned about the finances). It's more that the articles they write seem to align with the eb and flow of anthropics media tempo. This week it's FOMO, next week it's panacea, hack all the things week, followed by mild financial concerns with a but it will be fine tacked at the end. The articles tend to lack concreteness too. Maybe, it's just what reading The Economist is like when it's a domain you actually understand and follow closely?
Honestly, though I could probably say the same for a lot of publications these days.
If you work in the broader corporate world, your heads-down work may typically be writing software, but you're really more like staff IT. You get promoted into some kind of management role like "architect" and end up owning all the implementation instead of just the code.
You get passed the football a lot because that's more effective teamwork. You have weight in meetings because the business is smart enough to realize you are not just writing code. Your maintenance is basically all the operations short of the accounting and client manager stuff for that project.
AI is irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative. Nobody cares how you do it. The meetings are a way bigger deal than the code. These types of devs are the equivalent of a bureaucrat who can sign off on a construction job and then grab a shovel.
This is the actual "future" of dev work... ahem it looks a lot like the past and present for everyone else.
Which is all of our industry. You're lucky if you're in a pocket outside of timr crunch.
I guess it's true that corporate doesn't like hiring junior devs, but I'm not sure it was ever any other way. I'm not seeing where the fire is at. Corporate won't pay you SV wages either, but it's still respectable six-figures. You probably don't get stock either, but everyone gets a management bonus unless they're contractors. This is just basic middle america and it's the vast majority of the workforce.
I'm not trying to piss anyone off when I say this, but all the scifi doomer shit is wildly out of touch and preys on the inexperienced. You should question who is behind it.
That is being disrupted. Ironically, by American AI firms who want a cut of all software engineering salaries globally.
(+) UK software developer working for an American multinational here, aware that my salary is "great by UK standards but not by American ones"
Dunno why there was such resistance from the owning class afterwards with return to office mandates.
IMO the wrong thing to point at.
How many of us have ever, even before Covid, been in a trade union?
Unions definitely know about bargain power and power structures, yet also get it wrong when new tech arrives.
If you have a globally distributed sales team with no single office for example with people throughout APAC, the Philippines is the unquestionable place to hire for IT support roles for that region.
Even learning through open source participation requires understanding the English speaking culture, and that's a kind of knowledge that only people who have lived in those countries can really grasp.
In my case, most of my knowledge came from Microsoft's learning center materials. To actually learn deeply, I had to read papers. And I only knew about them because I went to graduate school. But there were already many libraries that made it easier to apply that knowledge without reading the papers directly.
So I think how useful AI is depends a lot on where you live and what kind of environment you're in
The average scam callcenter is relatively small scale with 20 workers in it and often is maintained within "family/friends", the POGO industry is very different and it's absolutely not reflecting the reality, that's just a particular niche that is mostly managed by foreign individuals (from China, Cambodia...)
I know a lot of Filipinos and essentially 100% of them in white-collar work are using the money to support their extended families. The money gets spent in a very different way than a Westerner would use it
Sounds like a skill issue
And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes