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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.

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Don't understand why this should not have been obvious. If you have technology that allows expensive workers to do things cheaper why wouldn't same technology allow cheaper workers to do stuff even cheaper... And cheap is good...

Can you explain why freelance writing and translation is being destroyed:

> 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?

I know a freelance translator and they have more business than ever, AI being "mostly" right is not good enough in many businesses. You need oversight and most importantly - accountability in the form of a human that can put their stamp of approval.

Cheaper price doesn't always lead to as large increase in demand. There is only so much writing and translation that is needed. So lowering price does not mean that same amount or more money is spend.

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.

The stakes are low for freelance writing and the majority of functional translation. You don’t really need a human to be responsible or blame when something goes wrong, unless it’s official translation in which case people still use human translators.

Indian tech sector has seen rapid decline; the Indian outsourcing model is obsolete.

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.

Sounds like wishful thinking rather than an on the ground reality.

I’m not sure if this is true. I really want the hiring story to be true, but the responses I am getting from people on the ground vs industry generated reports isn’t meeting up.

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.

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