5 ms·

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work,

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

booleandilemma 2y ago
My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.
- exe34 2y ago
  the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    Now, now, not with this mindset. You have to ask the Ai to fix the mess, and if it doesn't, try again!
    - mdaniel 2y ago
      AIUI one should be sure to include a grandmother dying if that div doesn't get centered
    - kolektiv 2y ago
      As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!
      - dragonelite 2y ago
        Ooh but don't you know we just need an extra language with abstractions that can be compiled into prompting statements. Maybe something like sql.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Recognizing a mess is much easier and takes less skill than fixing it.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way. We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years. (Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and hopefully maybe arrive at a trivial program solving a small algorithmic problem.)
    - SJC_Hacker 2y ago
      And full self driving is always just 5 years away.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        I wouldn't bet against it. Self-driving tech benefits directly from the outputs of sudden and continued growth of R&D in AI, fueled by hype-driven investments.
        Apocryphon 2y ago
        Maybe just like with self-driving cars, trying to hook mechanical precision up to messy human society is going to be fraught and lead to blowback. Meaning that once planes start falling out of the sky from vibe coding Boeing contractors there will be PR and regulatory panics that soften the hype somewhat. Or, the next time Equifax gets mass leaked and they blame their security setup on generative AI. You can’t vibe code your way out of human stupidity and the consequences of production environments.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Maybe, but the same thing could be said about JavaScript and webshit and the world is still there. We can just continue to not use YOLO technologies and culture in safety-critical applications.
      - gre 2y ago
CharlesW 2y ago
> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outsourcing-statistics/ https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...
- Etheryte 2y ago
  Even at its current size, the software outsourcing business is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the software business itself. While there's money to be made, clearly the hype didn't live up to even remotely what it promised to be.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe. I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes. But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    FWIW, if you believe that long-term, the market is a good optimizing engine (I think it's a very reasonable and well-proven belief), then this is just a matter of time before things sort themselves out. The need for companies to get more value out of less spend won't disappear, nor will the comparative advantage of companies in lower CoL areas of the globe. That's two fundamental incentives on both sides that are aligned, driving the market to find the lowest-energy path from here to there. It'll get there, even if it ends up looking strange (like, idk., maybe cutting out management intermediaries but involving a middleman acting as insurance). That is, if LLMs won't leapfrog it all and end software dev outsourcing before it started to work well.
mellosouls 2y ago
This is not about "LLM coding agents". It's about those agents being (mis)used in the very specific blind faith approach of "vibe coding", not least due to the hype merchants and grifters picking up the phrase and running with it shorn of the original cautionary notes about it being useful for bringing a bit of fun back into non-serious coding. Criticizing the idea (and conflating it with the wider field of LLM coding agents) without understanding that original context is not really any better. Vibe-coding <> LLM coding agents, which - when used properly - are brilliant for use in serious code and are here to stay.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> Then the reality hit. The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :). (I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I worked on a project with this exact development history.) The outsourcing market is alive and kicking, and offers a whole spectrum of quality and price. The more to the east of US you are, the easier it is to see :). > The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable. Nah, the difference here is, in outsourcing-to-LLMs scenario, there are no people who do the work and benefit from favorable salary/costs-of-living ratio.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Clubber 2y ago
  The company I worked for 15 years ago outsourced QA to save money. It was sold as paying $15 for a 4080 video card. When they opened the package, instead of a 4080, it was a brick. The salt in the wound was when they realized they overpaid 3x for a $5 brick. If it wasn't for vendor lock-in (they being the vendor), they would be dead. The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people could do 2 a day. They never improved. The offshore people who are tops aren't cheap.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    There's an art to outsourcing, and - even worse than with LLMs - it's not something you can ever just do and forget, because without active management, you'll eventually end up wasting money and time while getting nothing in return. QA is a whole other story, too. Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm. There's lots of false economy going with jobs, too. Getting rid of QA may save you salaries, but the work doesn't disappear - it just gets dumped on everyone else, and now you're distracting much more expensive engineers (software or otherwise), who do a much worse job at it (not being dedicated specialists) and cost more. On the net, I doubt it's ever saving companies any money, but the positives are easy to count, while negatives are diffused and hard to track beyond overall feeling that "somehow, everything takes longer than it should, and comes out worse than it should, who knows why?".
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Like some of the other responses, I'm baffled by your comment. Have you not seen what's happened in the past 5 years or so? Yes, there was an outsourcing craze to India after the .com bubble burst in the early 00s that largely failed - the timezone, cultural differences, and lack of good infrastructure support made it fail. The past 2 companies I've worked for offshored the majority of their software engineering work, and there was no quality difference compared to American devs. The offshore locations were Latin America and Europe, so plenty of timezone overlap. The companies are fully remote, so what difference does it make if the dev is in your same city or a thousand miles away? I think offshoring has absolutely put downward pressure on US dev salaries in the past couple years.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I think you're talking about a different phenomenon, having remote mixed teams is IMHO different from offshoring. There's at least the crucial difference that you had devs in both western countries and traditional "third world", where the 90s view of offshoring was throwing whole processes abroad and only keep "heads" in-house while the remote teams/companies would deal with all the execution, making it inherently difficult to deal with production monitoring. PS: to your point offshoring to India has become more common but Indian companies are also not that cheap, so we're past the initial framework. Perhaps the same way outsourcing production to China used to be about sweatshops, when it can now be about unrivaled expertise at a cost.

booleandilemma 2y ago

My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.

exe34 2y ago
the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  Now, now, not with this mindset. You have to ask the Ai to fix the mess, and if it doesn't, try again!
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    AIUI one should be sure to include a grandmother dying if that div doesn't get centered
  - kolektiv 2y ago
    As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!
    - dragonelite 2y ago
      Ooh but don't you know we just need an extra language with abstractions that can be compiled into prompting statements. Maybe something like sql.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Recognizing a mess is much easier and takes less skill than fixing it.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way. We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years. (Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and hopefully maybe arrive at a trivial program solving a small algorithmic problem.)
  - SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    And full self driving is always just 5 years away.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I wouldn't bet against it. Self-driving tech benefits directly from the outputs of sudden and continued growth of R&D in AI, fueled by hype-driven investments.
      - Apocryphon 2y ago
        Maybe just like with self-driving cars, trying to hook mechanical precision up to messy human society is going to be fraught and lead to blowback. Meaning that once planes start falling out of the sky from vibe coding Boeing contractors there will be PR and regulatory panics that soften the hype somewhat. Or, the next time Equifax gets mass leaked and they blame their security setup on generative AI. You can’t vibe code your way out of human stupidity and the consequences of production environments.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Maybe, but the same thing could be said about JavaScript and webshit and the world is still there. We can just continue to not use YOLO technologies and culture in safety-critical applications.
    - gre 2y ago

CharlesW 2y ago

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outsourcing-statistics/ https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

Etheryte 2y ago
Even at its current size, the software outsourcing business is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the software business itself. While there's money to be made, clearly the hype didn't live up to even remotely what it promised to be.
Nextgrid 2y ago
The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe. I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes. But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  FWIW, if you believe that long-term, the market is a good optimizing engine (I think it's a very reasonable and well-proven belief), then this is just a matter of time before things sort themselves out. The need for companies to get more value out of less spend won't disappear, nor will the comparative advantage of companies in lower CoL areas of the globe. That's two fundamental incentives on both sides that are aligned, driving the market to find the lowest-energy path from here to there. It'll get there, even if it ends up looking strange (like, idk., maybe cutting out management intermediaries but involving a middleman acting as insurance). That is, if LLMs won't leapfrog it all and end software dev outsourcing before it started to work well.

mellosouls 2y ago

This is not about "LLM coding agents". It's about those agents being (mis)used in the very specific blind faith approach of "vibe coding", not least due to the hype merchants and grifters picking up the phrase and running with it shorn of the original cautionary notes about it being useful for bringing a bit of fun back into non-serious coding. Criticizing the idea (and conflating it with the wider field of LLM coding agents) without understanding that original context is not really any better. Vibe-coding <> LLM coding agents, which - when used properly - are brilliant for use in serious code and are here to stay.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> Then the reality hit. The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :). (I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I worked on a project with this exact development history.) The outsourcing market is alive and kicking, and offers a whole spectrum of quality and price. The more to the east of US you are, the easier it is to see :). > The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable. Nah, the difference here is, in outsourcing-to-LLMs scenario, there are no people who do the work and benefit from favorable salary/costs-of-living ratio.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Clubber 2y ago
The company I worked for 15 years ago outsourced QA to save money. It was sold as paying $15 for a 4080 video card. When they opened the package, instead of a 4080, it was a brick. The salt in the wound was when they realized they overpaid 3x for a $5 brick. If it wasn't for vendor lock-in (they being the vendor), they would be dead. The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people could do 2 a day. They never improved. The offshore people who are tops aren't cheap.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  There's an art to outsourcing, and - even worse than with LLMs - it's not something you can ever just do and forget, because without active management, you'll eventually end up wasting money and time while getting nothing in return. QA is a whole other story, too. Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm. There's lots of false economy going with jobs, too. Getting rid of QA may save you salaries, but the work doesn't disappear - it just gets dumped on everyone else, and now you're distracting much more expensive engineers (software or otherwise), who do a much worse job at it (not being dedicated specialists) and cost more. On the net, I doubt it's ever saving companies any money, but the positives are easy to count, while negatives are diffused and hard to track beyond overall feeling that "somehow, everything takes longer than it should, and comes out worse than it should, who knows why?".

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Like some of the other responses, I'm baffled by your comment. Have you not seen what's happened in the past 5 years or so? Yes, there was an outsourcing craze to India after the .com bubble burst in the early 00s that largely failed - the timezone, cultural differences, and lack of good infrastructure support made it fail. The past 2 companies I've worked for offshored the majority of their software engineering work, and there was no quality difference compared to American devs. The offshore locations were Latin America and Europe, so plenty of timezone overlap. The companies are fully remote, so what difference does it make if the dev is in your same city or a thousand miles away? I think offshoring has absolutely put downward pressure on US dev salaries in the past couple years.

makeitdouble 2y ago
I think you're talking about a different phenomenon, having remote mixed teams is IMHO different from offshoring. There's at least the crucial difference that you had devs in both western countries and traditional "third world", where the 90s view of offshoring was throwing whole processes abroad and only keep "heads" in-house while the remote teams/companies would deal with all the execution, making it inherently difficult to deal with production monitoring. PS: to your point offshoring to India has become more common but Indian companies are also not that cheap, so we're past the initial framework. Perhaps the same way outsourcing production to China used to be about sweatshops, when it can now be about unrivaled expertise at a cost.