8 ms·

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass west

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house. There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. Of course, there will be a portion saying that we must keep our skills up to date. But not everyone can do heavy math, statistics, and ML. Just think of the developers who work on drupal, wordpress, javascript. What percentage do you think they can develop AI systems on tensorflow and neural nets? A major shift is coming. As developers, we need to prepare. Cue the cries for UBI.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
a-fake-account 9y ago
Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine. I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.
- dmitrygr 9y ago
  Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    Sure, if you're looking for a 'pile of JS' at the end of it.
  - ntsplnkv3 9y ago
    Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me. If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done. It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.
- scarface74 9y ago
  The last 3 jobs I've had is to rearchitect a badly written non scaleable, brittle system, with no unit tests to one that was better architected with automated testing. They tried to get away with cheap (domestic) coders and people who were at the company for 20 years.
ice109 9y ago
what exactly is the problem with this? a 50% pay cut is still a fantastic wage (globally relative). what exactly is wrong with the standard of living going up in other places while ours gets a little worse? also if the tech sector really loses half of it earning power the markets that cater to those people will simply deflate. globalization /is/ good in the long run because it brings supply/demand markets to an equilibrium. the problem is waiting for the equilibration.
- module0000 9y ago
  The problem with this is people don't like to take a loss, they will never be OK with taking one. Whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant, they wont' like it(the cause) and will rant and rave and possibly "do something about it"(the effect). tldr; people don't like pay cuts, whether it benefits someone else or not.
- samsonradu 9y ago
  This is quite objectively true. Take a 50% paycut but along with that also cut down the cost of living. Something like Germany today, wages are smaller than in US but the costs of living make their citizens happy(er). Then there will be less wage discrepancy compared to China and co and jobs start coming back.
  - redbeard0x0a 9y ago
    Add in our need to reduce carbon output, locally produced products will have some advantage.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    That's a lot easier said than done. I really have no influence on the cost of housing or food. So if I have a 50% pay cut, I'm probably not going to be able to live where I do.
    - samsonradu 9y ago
      I know, but it can start with bigger taxes on properties (and better zoning laws). People and investors should be stripped of the idea that buying a house provides a good return. Lowering the leverage when buying a house would also help push prices down. Foreign buyers should be taxed more to avoid speculators. I don't think food is a problem though, western EU food prices are not smaller.
aswanson 9y ago
Just doing the numbers from a stat standpoint, assuming you need to be in the top 2 percent of intelligence to code, there is a latent pool of 42 million developers in China/India waiting for their "go" signal. Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments, because capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  > capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades I don't think people realize how extremely true this is and how drastically different it will make the west look.
- j2bax 9y ago
  >Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of investments are referring to?
  - aswanson 9y ago
    I'd follow the advice that kcorbitt gives in this thread. Index funds and if you have knowledge of a sector, save 10-20 percent of your investment budget for a specific stock you think will outpace normal growth. Finally, given the coming societal dislocations, I'd brush up on survival skills and stock some firearms.
- kcorbitt 9y ago
  Personally, I'm hedging my bets by living lean and investing every spare dollar while I'm making hay at potentially unsustainably high wages. I'm also continuing to develop myself professionally, and preparing to move to a lower-CoL country in the future if that ends up making sense. If everything goes well, I'll have the option to retire young and rich. If the world goes pear-shaped, hopefully at least one of those measures will turn out to have been a good investment!
  - stouset 9y ago
    This is pretty well-trodden personal finance advice. When money is generally cheap and easy to come by, save instead of spend. When money is tight and hard to come by, spend. It's "buy low, sell high" applied to personal savings.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
> There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. One of my clients is one of the largest multinational corp. in the world. They're excellent at getting things done, above average at remote work, and obviously have offices around the world. Their primary industry has a drastically changing demographic in the US which is prompting a hiring wave of younger people. They would love nothing more than to hire most of them outside of the US. The schools in several countries in Asia outperform the US in the necessary areas of study and they speak fine English. I'm not talking about India. My client is working very hard to make this a reality. They will eventually pull it off. These jobs are all very good paying white collar jobs. I'm telling you the middle class in the US hasn't seen the beginning of the devastation they are about to endure. This is a trend that will continue until all labor is (as) equal (as an imperfect market will allow) no matter the geography. I see no trends (other than nationalism) that will make this stop.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  And who will buy all the neat gadgets that they're producing? It won't be the US; no middle class means no disposable income. It won't be the Chinese; they make everything in house. It probably won't be anyone else in Asia because they'll just buy it from China instead. Devastation of the middle class is about equivalent to devastation of the entire US economy. After we've willingly and successfully transferred all our manufacturing and engineering knowledge and processes to other countries... The only playing chip the US will have left is food exports.
  - notlefthanded 9y ago
    What about Hollywood? And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business?
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      > What about Hollywood? https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm Movie and music industry is in the "Information" labor category, which accounts for a whopping 1.8% of total employment... Oh, and Bollywood is already bigger than Hollywood. I don't see such trends reversing as we continue outsourcing CGI and other movie-making magic. There's nothing special about Hollywood that isn't able to be duplicated somewhere else. > And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business? These both almost solely benefit upper-class, and no one is arguing that they'll be just fine -- at least, for a longer period of time than everyone else.
Akkuma 9y ago
I think this is overestimating how qualified the coders are in the east compared to their western peers. Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. They said the education comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization, and the inability to handle scenarios not covered by that. I'll be more concerned once leading technologies that are used by the rest of the world come out of China and not from the US.
- madengr 9y ago
  Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.
- madengr 9y ago
  Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm process Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.
- bgee 9y ago
  > Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. I'm not surprised such comment came out from someone in Hong Kong but the truth is the education system in Hong Kong is even more "comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization". Actually, most East Asian education systems have a heavy focus on "book knowledge, so just memorization". Lack of innovation? Just look at Japan. Disclaimer: I'm from Mainland.
  - LiweiZ 9y ago
    What the GP mentioned is much closer to regional bias/stereotype. In my opinion, it's all about how much alignment a group of people can have while gearing towards making/producing something better. Japan has way more alignment, while everybody else in the crowded Asia is busy with taking a slightly better position and showing off to neighbours. People truly enjoy this kind of feelings. I don't think most of readers on HN can get and care about mainlanders' feeling of being somewhat offended in this case. So I just chuckled originally. But I hope my comment can supply some context.
jorblumesea 9y ago
I think it's actually going to be a trough. You have the creative frontend devs that are a mix of engineers and artists that make intuitive UIs. and the highly skilled ML/AI/PHD/Masters western educated engineers that will probably still be highly competitive. The ones hit the hardest will be your standard line engineer, the "Java Spring API" maintainers devs who just take tables from a DB and expose them as json blobs, write data feeds etc. This can easily be outsourced for much cheaper, and requires almost zero cultural knowledge, and is the bread and butter of any business.
bitcrusher 9y ago
This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!" I think the thing that folks keep missing is that technology isn't a zero sum game. So what if there are a shitload of people in the east doing programming cheaper? 9/10 of the 'type' of programming they're doing is grunt work that no one really wants to do anyway. Will some people feel the 'crunch' from this? probably, in the short term. But technical acumen doesn't sit still. We're not all languishing on our laurels with technology from the 90s while the Chinese are gearing up for total war. A much BIGGER problem, IMO, is our social policies tending towards overt xenophobia. THAT is what will kill the US and the Western European countries if we don't get off of this nationalist bandwagon that we find ourselves on.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!" And it will -- as it already ate lots of service and call center jobs. But these things take time, and India's schools are not exactly best of class.
- cmahler7 9y ago
  china is the most racist and nationalist country in the world and they are doing just fine. Why is the US and Europe the only places that have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of globalism? Why do China and Japan get free passes while anything done in the west to protect citizens interests is decried as xenophobic?
  - jameswatson_iii 9y ago
    Careful, you are exposing our dear cocooned friends to facts which may trigger immense cognitive dissonance. Statements such as this are tantamount to heresy within the new religion of globalism that has plagued the minds of the masses for the past half century.
  - MockObject 9y ago
    Created an account just to vote up this comment.
Danihan 9y ago
>Cue the cries for UBI. $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even with that, people would still work massive hours to obtain the best house on the block. But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that. How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too? I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

a-fake-account 9y ago

Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine. I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.

dmitrygr 9y ago
Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Sure, if you're looking for a 'pile of JS' at the end of it.
- ntsplnkv3 9y ago
  Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me. If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done. It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.
scarface74 9y ago
The last 3 jobs I've had is to rearchitect a badly written non scaleable, brittle system, with no unit tests to one that was better architected with automated testing. They tried to get away with cheap (domestic) coders and people who were at the company for 20 years.

ice109 9y ago

what exactly is the problem with this? a 50% pay cut is still a fantastic wage (globally relative). what exactly is wrong with the standard of living going up in other places while ours gets a little worse? also if the tech sector really loses half of it earning power the markets that cater to those people will simply deflate. globalization /is/ good in the long run because it brings supply/demand markets to an equilibrium. the problem is waiting for the equilibration.

module0000 9y ago
The problem with this is people don't like to take a loss, they will never be OK with taking one. Whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant, they wont' like it(the cause) and will rant and rave and possibly "do something about it"(the effect). tldr; people don't like pay cuts, whether it benefits someone else or not.
samsonradu 9y ago
This is quite objectively true. Take a 50% paycut but along with that also cut down the cost of living. Something like Germany today, wages are smaller than in US but the costs of living make their citizens happy(er). Then there will be less wage discrepancy compared to China and co and jobs start coming back.
- redbeard0x0a 9y ago
  Add in our need to reduce carbon output, locally produced products will have some advantage.
- s73ver 9y ago
  That's a lot easier said than done. I really have no influence on the cost of housing or food. So if I have a 50% pay cut, I'm probably not going to be able to live where I do.
  - samsonradu 9y ago
    I know, but it can start with bigger taxes on properties (and better zoning laws). People and investors should be stripped of the idea that buying a house provides a good return. Lowering the leverage when buying a house would also help push prices down. Foreign buyers should be taxed more to avoid speculators. I don't think food is a problem though, western EU food prices are not smaller.

aswanson 9y ago

Just doing the numbers from a stat standpoint, assuming you need to be in the top 2 percent of intelligence to code, there is a latent pool of 42 million developers in China/India waiting for their "go" signal. Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments, because capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.

ryanmarsh 9y ago
> capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades I don't think people realize how extremely true this is and how drastically different it will make the west look.
j2bax 9y ago
>Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of investments are referring to?
- aswanson 9y ago
  I'd follow the advice that kcorbitt gives in this thread. Index funds and if you have knowledge of a sector, save 10-20 percent of your investment budget for a specific stock you think will outpace normal growth. Finally, given the coming societal dislocations, I'd brush up on survival skills and stock some firearms.
kcorbitt 9y ago
Personally, I'm hedging my bets by living lean and investing every spare dollar while I'm making hay at potentially unsustainably high wages. I'm also continuing to develop myself professionally, and preparing to move to a lower-CoL country in the future if that ends up making sense. If everything goes well, I'll have the option to retire young and rich. If the world goes pear-shaped, hopefully at least one of those measures will turn out to have been a good investment!
- stouset 9y ago
  This is pretty well-trodden personal finance advice. When money is generally cheap and easy to come by, save instead of spend. When money is tight and hard to come by, spend. It's "buy low, sell high" applied to personal savings.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

> There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. One of my clients is one of the largest multinational corp. in the world. They're excellent at getting things done, above average at remote work, and obviously have offices around the world. Their primary industry has a drastically changing demographic in the US which is prompting a hiring wave of younger people. They would love nothing more than to hire most of them outside of the US. The schools in several countries in Asia outperform the US in the necessary areas of study and they speak fine English. I'm not talking about India. My client is working very hard to make this a reality. They will eventually pull it off. These jobs are all very good paying white collar jobs. I'm telling you the middle class in the US hasn't seen the beginning of the devastation they are about to endure. This is a trend that will continue until all labor is (as) equal (as an imperfect market will allow) no matter the geography. I see no trends (other than nationalism) that will make this stop.

jdmichal 9y ago
And who will buy all the neat gadgets that they're producing? It won't be the US; no middle class means no disposable income. It won't be the Chinese; they make everything in house. It probably won't be anyone else in Asia because they'll just buy it from China instead. Devastation of the middle class is about equivalent to devastation of the entire US economy. After we've willingly and successfully transferred all our manufacturing and engineering knowledge and processes to other countries... The only playing chip the US will have left is food exports.
- notlefthanded 9y ago
  What about Hollywood? And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business?
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    > What about Hollywood? https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm Movie and music industry is in the "Information" labor category, which accounts for a whopping 1.8% of total employment... Oh, and Bollywood is already bigger than Hollywood. I don't see such trends reversing as we continue outsourcing CGI and other movie-making magic. There's nothing special about Hollywood that isn't able to be duplicated somewhere else. > And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business? These both almost solely benefit upper-class, and no one is arguing that they'll be just fine -- at least, for a longer period of time than everyone else.

Akkuma 9y ago

I think this is overestimating how qualified the coders are in the east compared to their western peers. Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. They said the education comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization, and the inability to handle scenarios not covered by that. I'll be more concerned once leading technologies that are used by the rest of the world come out of China and not from the US.

madengr 9y ago
Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.
madengr 9y ago
Leading technologies are already coming out of China. I'm not a coder, I'm an EE, but China has GaN and nm process Si fabs, millimeter wave components, 4G radio technology. They have/had the fastest supercomputer, largest radio telescope, manned spaceflight, and some advanced military hardware.
bgee 9y ago
> Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. I'm not surprised such comment came out from someone in Hong Kong but the truth is the education system in Hong Kong is even more "comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization". Actually, most East Asian education systems have a heavy focus on "book knowledge, so just memorization". Lack of innovation? Just look at Japan. Disclaimer: I'm from Mainland.
- LiweiZ 9y ago
  What the GP mentioned is much closer to regional bias/stereotype. In my opinion, it's all about how much alignment a group of people can have while gearing towards making/producing something better. Japan has way more alignment, while everybody else in the crowded Asia is busy with taking a slightly better position and showing off to neighbours. People truly enjoy this kind of feelings. I don't think most of readers on HN can get and care about mainlanders' feeling of being somewhat offended in this case. So I just chuckled originally. But I hope my comment can supply some context.

jorblumesea 9y ago

I think it's actually going to be a trough. You have the creative frontend devs that are a mix of engineers and artists that make intuitive UIs. and the highly skilled ML/AI/PHD/Masters western educated engineers that will probably still be highly competitive. The ones hit the hardest will be your standard line engineer, the "Java Spring API" maintainers devs who just take tables from a DB and expose them as json blobs, write data feeds etc. This can easily be outsourced for much cheaper, and requires almost zero cultural knowledge, and is the bread and butter of any business.

bitcrusher 9y ago

This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!" I think the thing that folks keep missing is that technology isn't a zero sum game. So what if there are a shitload of people in the east doing programming cheaper? 9/10 of the 'type' of programming they're doing is grunt work that no one really wants to do anyway. Will some people feel the 'crunch' from this? probably, in the short term. But technical acumen doesn't sit still. We're not all languishing on our laurels with technology from the 90s while the Chinese are gearing up for total war. A much BIGGER problem, IMO, is our social policies tending towards overt xenophobia. THAT is what will kill the US and the Western European countries if we don't get off of this nationalist bandwagon that we find ourselves on.

coldtea 9y ago
>This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!" And it will -- as it already ate lots of service and call center jobs. But these things take time, and India's schools are not exactly best of class.
cmahler7 9y ago
china is the most racist and nationalist country in the world and they are doing just fine. Why is the US and Europe the only places that have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of globalism? Why do China and Japan get free passes while anything done in the west to protect citizens interests is decried as xenophobic?
- jameswatson_iii 9y ago
  Careful, you are exposing our dear cocooned friends to facts which may trigger immense cognitive dissonance. Statements such as this are tantamount to heresy within the new religion of globalism that has plagued the minds of the masses for the past half century.
- MockObject 9y ago
  Created an account just to vote up this comment.

Danihan 9y ago

>Cue the cries for UBI. $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even with that, people would still work massive hours to obtain the best house on the block. But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that. How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too? I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.