3 ms·

My gut feeling is that the offshore workers are going to be replaced by AI first. They have a reputation of bad quality work unfortunately, and it’s hard to kno

My gut feeling is that the offshore workers are going to be replaced by AI first. They have a reputation of bad quality work unfortunately, and it’s hard to know ahead of time who is good and who isn’t because there aren’t many connections (connections is how people are going to be hired exclusively moving forward IMO).

arresin 1y ago
> They have a reputation of bad quality That is an extreme understatement.
perrygeo 1y ago
Offshore workers and generative AI have a lot in common. Little formal training. Lots of book smarts but zero context. Performs ok at well specified tasks, extremely poorly otherwise. Cannot understand human-written design documents with enough nuance. No aesthetic design sense. And finally their undisputed ability to pump out high volumes of code (including high volumes of garbage). The only difference is that LLMs have a deeper and wider understanding of English, no time zone barriers, and nearly instant response time. I find it hard to picture a world where AI doesn't decimate these types of low-skill software jobs.
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  Maybe because off-shoring is so prevalent most of the code nowadays is written off-shore and so that is the code that went into training LLMs and that code then biases LLMs to write code like an off-shore engineer. The solution is obvious, we need to employ the best and brightest minds, put them in spaces where all their needs are met and they are protected from bureacracy, off the rails stakeholders and PMs, so that they can write the cleanest best Carmackian code there can be. Then after that generation of code is written, we use it as training data for the next generation LLM.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  The thing is that now a lot of them have been moved onshore and into management levels at a lot of US-based companies. From what I've seen, not much better at those aspects than they are at coding. Hard to know if they'll cut loose everyone on the ladder below them or want to keep a large headcount below them.

arresin 1y ago

> They have a reputation of bad quality That is an extreme understatement.

perrygeo 1y ago

Offshore workers and generative AI have a lot in common. Little formal training. Lots of book smarts but zero context. Performs ok at well specified tasks, extremely poorly otherwise. Cannot understand human-written design documents with enough nuance. No aesthetic design sense. And finally their undisputed ability to pump out high volumes of code (including high volumes of garbage). The only difference is that LLMs have a deeper and wider understanding of English, no time zone barriers, and nearly instant response time. I find it hard to picture a world where AI doesn't decimate these types of low-skill software jobs.

mnky9800n 1y ago
Maybe because off-shoring is so prevalent most of the code nowadays is written off-shore and so that is the code that went into training LLMs and that code then biases LLMs to write code like an off-shore engineer. The solution is obvious, we need to employ the best and brightest minds, put them in spaces where all their needs are met and they are protected from bureacracy, off the rails stakeholders and PMs, so that they can write the cleanest best Carmackian code there can be. Then after that generation of code is written, we use it as training data for the next generation LLM.
ctkhn 1y ago
The thing is that now a lot of them have been moved onshore and into management levels at a lot of US-based companies. From what I've seen, not much better at those aspects than they are at coding. Hard to know if they'll cut loose everyone on the ladder below them or want to keep a large headcount below them.