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Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid

Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid top dollar for the Americans. And American business still pays top dollar. Even more than before. The judgement was always the problem. If the issue was bodies in seats the problem was already solved. The #1 cause of layoffs in America is offshoring caused by Zoom and other telework tools perfected during COVID. AI is a convenient excuse. Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity. The rare song that elevates a new artist quickly converts them into celebrity, which converts future songs in their style into further hits 100,000x easier than before. Maybe even 1 billion times easier than before given the amount of songs created every year. Yet AI is supposedly an expert at generating music, and images, and video, and code, and on and on. I’m not seeing the evidence of layoffs from AI. I’m seeing evidence of better productivity from existing employees, which is the same result of every groundbreaking technology since all time.

MangoToupe 1y ago
> Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity. Interesting and bold statement. How do you distinguish the two?
- kusokurae 1y ago
  Worth mentioning here that historically a lot of the famous pop hits have had plenty of interesting technical decisions typically only a mature composer would come up with. Weird short bars, time signature stuff, temporary key changes, weird jazz chords etc. You don't notice them because they're refined choices.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  Whatever schlock Taylor Swift manufactures next will be a global hit. Doesn’t matter the quality
  - triceratops 1y ago
    It would be an interesting experiment to have a global music star do a Richard Bachman.
- simianwords 1y ago
  Empirically: by randomly asking N participants to rate pop music made by a celeb and by an indie band and observing if these participants were able to identify the celeb statistically.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
The thing that stopped people from hiring 10-100 offshore devs per American dev lead/architect was communication primarily, with quality floor being an additional factor. Plenty of American companies have "hired 10-100 offshore devs" per American lead/architect, but they call it a foreign office, they solve the communication problem by having on-site managers that can serve as proxies, and they solve the quality floor problem by having the office in countries where the locals have strong expertise. If AI can solve the communication and quality floor problems (it's pretty close), having 100 agents per dev lead/architect becomes perfectly viable.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > they solve the communication problem by having on-site managers that can serve as proxies, and they solve the quality floor problem by having the office in countries where the locals have strong expertise. I think this problem goes deeper: there exist lots of countries where people are strong in programming, but from my work experience, the whole "programming culture" (how to approach problems; how to structure the program; ...) differs quite a bit between countries. So, from other countries you can get great programs, but the style can differ quite a bit from what you are used to.

MangoToupe 1y ago

> Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity. Interesting and bold statement. How do you distinguish the two?

kusokurae 1y ago
Worth mentioning here that historically a lot of the famous pop hits have had plenty of interesting technical decisions typically only a mature composer would come up with. Weird short bars, time signature stuff, temporary key changes, weird jazz chords etc. You don't notice them because they're refined choices.
monero-xmr 1y ago
Whatever schlock Taylor Swift manufactures next will be a global hit. Doesn’t matter the quality
- triceratops 1y ago
  It would be an interesting experiment to have a global music star do a Richard Bachman.
simianwords 1y ago
Empirically: by randomly asking N participants to rate pop music made by a celeb and by an indie band and observing if these participants were able to identify the celeb statistically.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

The thing that stopped people from hiring 10-100 offshore devs per American dev lead/architect was communication primarily, with quality floor being an additional factor. Plenty of American companies have "hired 10-100 offshore devs" per American lead/architect, but they call it a foreign office, they solve the communication problem by having on-site managers that can serve as proxies, and they solve the quality floor problem by having the office in countries where the locals have strong expertise. If AI can solve the communication and quality floor problems (it's pretty close), having 100 agents per dev lead/architect becomes perfectly viable.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> they solve the communication problem by having on-site managers that can serve as proxies, and they solve the quality floor problem by having the office in countries where the locals have strong expertise. I think this problem goes deeper: there exist lots of countries where people are strong in programming, but from my work experience, the whole "programming culture" (how to approach problems; how to structure the program; ...) differs quite a bit between countries. So, from other countries you can get great programs, but the style can differ quite a bit from what you are used to.