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That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world w

by Havoc 2y ago

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

Espressosaurus 2y ago
I believe AI is the excuse, but that this is just to cover another wave of outsourcing.
rossdavidh 2y ago
You have a point, all people do like to think they're more irreplaceable than they are, but the last round of offshoring of programmers did in fact end up with the companies trying to reverse course a few years later. GM was the most well-known example of this, but I worked at several organizations that found that getting software done on the other side of the planet was a bad idea, and ended up having to reverse course. The core issue is that the bottleneck step in software development isn't actually the ability to program a specific thing, it's the process of discovering what it is we actually want the program to do. Having your programmers AT THE OFFICE and in close communication with the people who need the software, is the best way to get that done. Having them on the other side of the planet turned out to be the worse way. This is unintuitive (to programmers as well as the organizations that might employ them), and therefore they have to discover it the hard way. I don't think this is something LLMs will be good at, now or ever. There may come a day when neural networks (or some other ML) will be able to do that, but that day is not near.
marcosdumay 2y ago
> That’s what people said about outsourcing too. And they were right... and a lot of companies fully failed because of it. And the corporate meat grinder kept rolling forward anyway. And the decision makers were all shielded from the consequences of their incompetence anyway. When the market is completely corrupted, nothing means anything.
beretguy 2y ago
I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  When comparing sweatshops to a proper inhouse team I think the ingroup and outgroup can be left unspecified. I fear I one day wake up and have become a jingoist.

by Havoc 2y ago

Espressosaurus 2y ago

I believe AI is the excuse, but that this is just to cover another wave of outsourcing.

rossdavidh 2y ago

You have a point, all people do like to think they're more irreplaceable than they are, but the last round of offshoring of programmers did in fact end up with the companies trying to reverse course a few years later. GM was the most well-known example of this, but I worked at several organizations that found that getting software done on the other side of the planet was a bad idea, and ended up having to reverse course. The core issue is that the bottleneck step in software development isn't actually the ability to program a specific thing, it's the process of discovering what it is we actually want the program to do. Having your programmers AT THE OFFICE and in close communication with the people who need the software, is the best way to get that done. Having them on the other side of the planet turned out to be the worse way. This is unintuitive (to programmers as well as the organizations that might employ them), and therefore they have to discover it the hard way. I don't think this is something LLMs will be good at, now or ever. There may come a day when neural networks (or some other ML) will be able to do that, but that day is not near.

marcosdumay 2y ago

> That’s what people said about outsourcing too. And they were right... and a lot of companies fully failed because of it. And the corporate meat grinder kept rolling forward anyway. And the decision makers were all shielded from the consequences of their incompetence anyway. When the market is completely corrupted, nothing means anything.

beretguy 2y ago

I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.

rightbyte 2y ago
When comparing sweatshops to a proper inhouse team I think the ingroup and outgroup can be left unspecified. I fear I one day wake up and have become a jingoist.