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It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI producti

It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions. Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.

entuno 1y ago
The key thing that I feel often gets overlooked in these discussions is that those offshore people are using AI tools as well. It's not "AI or offshoring", it's "offshoring to AI". Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work. Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions. Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU. Maybe they won't.
yubblegum 1y ago
In 2010 I sat in a meet with an exec from an NYC investment bank with my boss, the ceo of a boutique (not Indians ..) outsourcing consultancy. We were in his office and outside was an entire empty floor of cubicles. He casually mentioned how the outsourced work is "crap" and how they usually end up having to redo the projects up to 3 times. He then went on to say how they outsourced "this floor" and their plans for outsourcing the other floors. The economic equation never made any sense. There is, imo, a geopolitical element to the outsourcing pheonomena in context of software and India (which btw was spearheaded by MorganStanley and friends) back in late '90s: India used to be firmly in the non-aligned group and has had long standing pseudo-aliance with USSR/Russians. Giving the IT sector to India was part of the carrot to get India to shift to the West. China got the manufacturing, India got the software.

entuno 1y ago

The key thing that I feel often gets overlooked in these discussions is that those offshore people are using AI tools as well. It's not "AI or offshoring", it's "offshoring to AI". Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work. Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

> But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions. Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU. Maybe they won't.

yubblegum 1y ago

In 2010 I sat in a meet with an exec from an NYC investment bank with my boss, the ceo of a boutique (not Indians ..) outsourcing consultancy. We were in his office and outside was an entire empty floor of cubicles. He casually mentioned how the outsourced work is "crap" and how they usually end up having to redo the projects up to 3 times. He then went on to say how they outsourced "this floor" and their plans for outsourcing the other floors. The economic equation never made any sense. There is, imo, a geopolitical element to the outsourcing pheonomena in context of software and India (which btw was spearheaded by MorganStanley and friends) back in late '90s: India used to be firmly in the non-aligned group and has had long standing pseudo-aliance with USSR/Russians. Giving the IT sector to India was part of the carrot to get India to shift to the West. China got the manufacturing, India got the software.