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> which is moving towards increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence It is such baseless stuff which irks me every time, I have read from MANY paper

> which is moving towards increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence It is such baseless stuff which irks me every time, I have read from MANY papers that automation is doing this that without explicitly saying X automation firm screwed up the revenues. I would like to see visible proof that "automation" is eating into the revenues, no report says that, they just say "automation and AI" The journalists don't know difference between AI vs ML and everyone is acting as if "AI and automation" will destroy X firm, no, they won't. Anyone who works in the sw field would know that there are many manual things done in the project so much so that there wouldn't be an "automation firm" which would sell blah blah robots to do human work. It is way off into the future, if it'll ever happen. This madness has to stop. edit: clarification about who they meant

ramshanker 9y ago
>>They don't know difference between AI vs ML<< Yea, very true, The ratio of (Engineers / Managers) need to substantially increase over here.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  I did not mean the people working in IT, I meant the journalists, they just say "AI is eating the world" without knowing anything. "automation and AI" are eating into the revenues. Why exactly is building these "automation" so much that the revenues are getting affected?
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Maybe these crappy IT consulting firms make a large amount of their income from selling the 'same fix' over and over again. When the customer moves to a newer system the number of legacy problems drops dramatically, and the new systems can scale far beyond their current needs before capacity problems increase billable hours again. I've seen it myself doing MSP work. Crappy old system breaks with every program update, every windows update, the wind blows the wrong direction, etc, etc. Client updates to new computers with SSD, new software based partially/mostly in the cloud. Full and correct integration with active directory. Their complaint load can easily drop 5 to 10 fold, mostly from less legacy software issues.
delegate 9y ago
Why are you so convinced that it's not happening ? Each time something, which used to be done by humans, is done by a machine, that time spent doing that something is no longer payed to a human and only a fraction goes to the makers of the machine - that's the whole point of automation - reduce costs and increase productivity. It doesn't lead to [more] humans being payed more money. I think intuitively it makes sense, but coming up with undeniable proof is quite hard in the globalized economy - the effects of automation often happen further away in the supply-chain graph. The 'modernized' company just stops importing or paying for X, because they can now do it 'in-house' for a fraction of what it cost them before. The effect of that is that someone somewhere on the other side of the planet might not be able to find a job doing X as easily as they did before. Or their company goes bankrupt. Is it because of automation ? Could be. It might create new opportunities, but those require newer and 'higher-level' skills - and as these opportunities arise, someone somewhere is already hacking away trying to automate them. And we're getting better and better at this, so the new opportunities are only available for a short period of time, until someone comes up with a brilliant new way of doing things. The software world is a great example. I personally think it's very real and being in denial the way that many people in SV are, does not improve matters. We (the technologists) should at least ponder upon these questions and figure out solutions - otherwise we're leaving that in the hands of politicians, which serves as zero comfort to me.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  I know that in some or the other sense tooling is happening, efficient tools are written. For instance, I wrote a python script which saved $10k per year, this doesn't mean that companies are going bankrupt because of "automation and AI". This "automation and AI" wave in newspapers is a figment of their infertile imagination.
gilfoyle 9y ago
I think the role of AI in eliminating these jobs is overstated compared to the role of Cloud, Dev Ops automation and faster iteration cycles afforded by relatively better abstractions and tools for building software compared to 10-15 years ago. A lot of these large IT companies relied on long term maintenance contracts for infrastructure and legacy software with unnecessarily large teams on self serving time and material (T&M) models. But these days, even large enterprises have to innovate to stay in the game and their experience with top end Agile consulting firms made them realize that you can do with much fewer people with automation and hiring better. On the other hand, the large IT companies got stuck with their old model and without training and experience on challenging projects, the talent atrophied even while having to eek higher salaries every year due to inflation and talent loss to startups and others. However, the numbers being reported so far aren't huge compared to the employee sizes of these companies. For e.g. 5% layoff would actually be a reasonable trim on an annual basis. In that sense, the carnage hasn't started yet.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  This is what should be in the newspapers rather than "AI and automation"
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    It's not really AI, but it is a kind of automation, right?
    - thewhitetulip 9y ago
      Yes, but automation alone isn't causing layoffs! Bad management is. They are just hiding their own failures on the pretext of "risk of automation and AI", it is nonsense!
pjmorris 9y ago
If you've ever spun up a VM rather than unboxing and configuring a physical server, you have the visible proof that you seek. If you've ever used Chef/Puppet/Ansible to configure X number of machines rather than configuring each one by hand, you have the visible proof you seek. And that's before getting in to the recommendations and optimizations that AI/ML can offer... it's just the old fashioned AI/ML, MBA's with a spreadsheet, deciding they don't need all those unboxers/configurers anymore.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  This thread is not about web hosting companies. Chef did not replace jobs in the Indian IT sector, it just made it easier to deploy things. We need to separate our discussion points. I know that tooling is improving considerably, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean that IT companies will now be downsizing to 10 because of chef or puppet.
  - pjmorris 9y ago
    You're saying that it isn't reasonable to imagine that companies might decide to do their own virtual infrastructure rather than hiring Indian IT firms to build infrastructure for them? I will keep my own counsel on that.
    - thewhitetulip 9y ago
      I am not saying anything of that sort, all I am saying is that layoffs are not happening because of "automation and AI". If a company wants an inhouse dev team they'd do so without "automation and AI", the thing is, they don't and that's why enterprise software companies are formed. Sure, I can bake my own bread, grow my own vegetables, mine coal for electricity myself, but I don't. I do what I do best and leave the other stuff to others. It is upto companies to decide if they want to build infra for them.
  - giobox 9y ago
    Agreed. I'm not going to pretend or claim I understand the market forces leading to these firms downsizing, but I too find the idea of tooling like Chef and Puppet causing a measurable downturn in staff numbers at the big Indian IT firms hard to believe. Whilst DevOps automation tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Whatever have undoubtedly increased in popularity, very often they are just used as nicer ways to achieve the same thing IT professionals have been doing forever in shell scripts or similar. This is purely speculation, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if US companies are simply less interested in hiring Indian outsource firms given the current climate and uncertainty around the future of work visas in the US. It's not hard to imagine such companies indicating they will spend less with these firms for the foreseeable future. I don't think anyone believes eventual reform of the H1B visa, the lifeblood of Indian IT firms in their biggest market, is going to be good for the Wipros of the world.

ramshanker 9y ago

>>They don't know difference between AI vs ML<< Yea, very true, The ratio of (Engineers / Managers) need to substantially increase over here.

thewhitetulip 9y ago
I did not mean the people working in IT, I meant the journalists, they just say "AI is eating the world" without knowing anything. "automation and AI" are eating into the revenues. Why exactly is building these "automation" so much that the revenues are getting affected?
- pixl97 9y ago
  Maybe these crappy IT consulting firms make a large amount of their income from selling the 'same fix' over and over again. When the customer moves to a newer system the number of legacy problems drops dramatically, and the new systems can scale far beyond their current needs before capacity problems increase billable hours again. I've seen it myself doing MSP work. Crappy old system breaks with every program update, every windows update, the wind blows the wrong direction, etc, etc. Client updates to new computers with SSD, new software based partially/mostly in the cloud. Full and correct integration with active directory. Their complaint load can easily drop 5 to 10 fold, mostly from less legacy software issues.

delegate 9y ago

Why are you so convinced that it's not happening ? Each time something, which used to be done by humans, is done by a machine, that time spent doing that something is no longer payed to a human and only a fraction goes to the makers of the machine - that's the whole point of automation - reduce costs and increase productivity. It doesn't lead to [more] humans being payed more money. I think intuitively it makes sense, but coming up with undeniable proof is quite hard in the globalized economy - the effects of automation often happen further away in the supply-chain graph. The 'modernized' company just stops importing or paying for X, because they can now do it 'in-house' for a fraction of what it cost them before. The effect of that is that someone somewhere on the other side of the planet might not be able to find a job doing X as easily as they did before. Or their company goes bankrupt. Is it because of automation ? Could be. It might create new opportunities, but those require newer and 'higher-level' skills - and as these opportunities arise, someone somewhere is already hacking away trying to automate them. And we're getting better and better at this, so the new opportunities are only available for a short period of time, until someone comes up with a brilliant new way of doing things. The software world is a great example. I personally think it's very real and being in denial the way that many people in SV are, does not improve matters. We (the technologists) should at least ponder upon these questions and figure out solutions - otherwise we're leaving that in the hands of politicians, which serves as zero comfort to me.

thewhitetulip 9y ago
I know that in some or the other sense tooling is happening, efficient tools are written. For instance, I wrote a python script which saved $10k per year, this doesn't mean that companies are going bankrupt because of "automation and AI". This "automation and AI" wave in newspapers is a figment of their infertile imagination.

gilfoyle 9y ago

I think the role of AI in eliminating these jobs is overstated compared to the role of Cloud, Dev Ops automation and faster iteration cycles afforded by relatively better abstractions and tools for building software compared to 10-15 years ago. A lot of these large IT companies relied on long term maintenance contracts for infrastructure and legacy software with unnecessarily large teams on self serving time and material (T&M) models. But these days, even large enterprises have to innovate to stay in the game and their experience with top end Agile consulting firms made them realize that you can do with much fewer people with automation and hiring better. On the other hand, the large IT companies got stuck with their old model and without training and experience on challenging projects, the talent atrophied even while having to eek higher salaries every year due to inflation and talent loss to startups and others. However, the numbers being reported so far aren't huge compared to the employee sizes of these companies. For e.g. 5% layoff would actually be a reasonable trim on an annual basis. In that sense, the carnage hasn't started yet.

thewhitetulip 9y ago
This is what should be in the newspapers rather than "AI and automation"
- humanrebar 9y ago
  It's not really AI, but it is a kind of automation, right?
  - thewhitetulip 9y ago
    Yes, but automation alone isn't causing layoffs! Bad management is. They are just hiding their own failures on the pretext of "risk of automation and AI", it is nonsense!

pjmorris 9y ago

If you've ever spun up a VM rather than unboxing and configuring a physical server, you have the visible proof that you seek. If you've ever used Chef/Puppet/Ansible to configure X number of machines rather than configuring each one by hand, you have the visible proof you seek. And that's before getting in to the recommendations and optimizations that AI/ML can offer... it's just the old fashioned AI/ML, MBA's with a spreadsheet, deciding they don't need all those unboxers/configurers anymore.

thewhitetulip 9y ago
This thread is not about web hosting companies. Chef did not replace jobs in the Indian IT sector, it just made it easier to deploy things. We need to separate our discussion points. I know that tooling is improving considerably, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean that IT companies will now be downsizing to 10 because of chef or puppet.
- pjmorris 9y ago
  You're saying that it isn't reasonable to imagine that companies might decide to do their own virtual infrastructure rather than hiring Indian IT firms to build infrastructure for them? I will keep my own counsel on that.
  - thewhitetulip 9y ago
    I am not saying anything of that sort, all I am saying is that layoffs are not happening because of "automation and AI". If a company wants an inhouse dev team they'd do so without "automation and AI", the thing is, they don't and that's why enterprise software companies are formed. Sure, I can bake my own bread, grow my own vegetables, mine coal for electricity myself, but I don't. I do what I do best and leave the other stuff to others. It is upto companies to decide if they want to build infra for them.
- giobox 9y ago
  Agreed. I'm not going to pretend or claim I understand the market forces leading to these firms downsizing, but I too find the idea of tooling like Chef and Puppet causing a measurable downturn in staff numbers at the big Indian IT firms hard to believe. Whilst DevOps automation tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Whatever have undoubtedly increased in popularity, very often they are just used as nicer ways to achieve the same thing IT professionals have been doing forever in shell scripts or similar. This is purely speculation, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if US companies are simply less interested in hiring Indian outsource firms given the current climate and uncertainty around the future of work visas in the US. It's not hard to imagine such companies indicating they will spend less with these firms for the foreseeable future. I don't think anyone believes eventual reform of the H1B visa, the lifeblood of Indian IT firms in their biggest market, is going to be good for the Wipros of the world.