10 ms·

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. Ther

by fibers 1y ago

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if they aren't properly attested to.

lazide 1y ago
Yup, 95% of the AI hype is to apply pressure on the labor market and provide cover for offshoring/downsizing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pipes 1y ago
  Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?
  - runako 1y ago
    Every executive publicly saying obviously* false things like X job will be done by AI in 18 months is putting downward pressure on the labor market. The pressure is essentially peer pressure among executives: are we stupid for continuing to hire engineers instead of handing our engineering budget to Anthropic? * - Someone should maintain a walkback list to track these. I believe recent additions are Amodei of Anthropic and the CEOs of AWS and Salesforce. (Benioff of Salesforce, in February: "We're not going to hire any new engineers this year." Their careers page shows a pivot from that position.)
    - lokrian 1y ago
      Maybe it's a good time to ask for advice. Which IT job roles and companies are least vulnerable to offshoring? Defense contractors and the like?
      - asa400 1y ago
        Stuff that isn’t pure SaaS. Physical products that benefit from hands on interaction with customers, worksites, and other internal producers. Small and/or local businesses that want someone whose face they can see in person.
  - lewhoo 1y ago
    1 person billion dollar company - the new buzz phrase when "democratize" became so yesterday is in my opinion just that.
BolsunBacset 1y ago
[flagged]
- seneca 1y ago
  I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.
  - skeeterbug 1y ago
    Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.
    - seneca 1y ago
      It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.
      - HankStallone 1y ago
        I wouldn't say it's unprecedented, since I first heard about a call center in Texas that was over 90% foreign labor several years ago. But it's certainly gotten worse. I suspect that some companies/policymakers may be trying to flood the market, so to speak, in case importing them gets harder in the future or a bunch get sent home.
    - vitaflo 1y ago
      The difference now is many companies have offices offshore with their own management. This isn’t the old offshore consulting to save a few bucks now. This is company employees who just cost a lot less. Once AI becomes more mature this will accelerate rapidly. Companies are going to do whatever they can to reduce labor costs. Always have.
ACCount37 1y ago
The reports from the usual "offshoring centers" aren't exactly inspiring. It's a bloodbath over there. Seems like the capabilities of current systems map onto "the kind of labor that gets offshored" quite well. Some of the jobs that would get offloaded to India now get offloaded to Anthropic's datacenters instead.
- Mars008 1y ago
  And some jobs, offshored or not, are just human frontend to datacenters.
the_real_cher 1y ago
This is exactly right. The H1B pipeline has not decreased at all whereas millions of American workers have been laid off.
- fibers 1y ago
  Maybe for software engineering but not for accounting. I've had to interface with many offshored teams and interviewed at places where accounting ops were in COE centers in EU/APAC.
  - the_real_cher 1y ago
    Offshoring is parallel to H1B. Happening simultaneously sadly.
elif 1y ago
Do you have any evidence of this because the rationale seems like a coping strategy or conspiracy theory how it's being suppositioned.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  Do you have any actual evidence that supports the headline? The article does not. It simply mentions 13% decline in relative employment and then blames AI with no actual evidence. Given what I know about the current state of AI and off-shoring, I think off-shoring is a million times more likely to be the culprit than AI.
- fibers 1y ago
  Have you seen how the profession has worked post SOX? Did you know 2016 was the peak year where you had accounting students enrolled in uni in the states? I want you to think laterally about this.
- stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  The entire account department at my firm has moved to Poland. That’s nice for them, but as a US citizen it does mean the writing is on the wall. On the plus side I learned a fun fact. Malgorzata is a more common name than I had ever imagined. IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.
londons_explore 1y ago
> Audit quality will continue to suffer I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer? Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?
- fibers 1y ago
  Then you would have to think twice about the company you may be giving money to (ie the stock market and private bank loans). That's the whole objective of this. Every company is going to need an accountant in one way or another and you don't really need to follow strict GAAP for management requirements (what else is EBIDTA for if anything?), but it's something completely different than saying: I made x dollars and spent y dollars, here is what I have and what I owe, please give me money. At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.
- drusepth 1y ago
  > Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer? Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?
  - tobyjsullivan 1y ago
    I read it as assuming the deterministic checks and balances are already absent. We have the illusion of determinism but, in practice, audits (and justice) are mostly theatre as it is. From that perspective, lowering the quality of something that is already non-rigourous might not have any perceivable effect. It’s only a problem if public perception lowers, but that’s a marketing issue that the big-4 already have a handle on.
    - 1y ago
tootie 1y ago
Found this article from last year saying IIT grads are facing the same grim outlook as technology hiring in India for new grads has also dried up https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/tough-job-market-for-india-s-elite-engineers-sparks-ai-led-existential-concern https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/tough-... So, that doesn't seem like a likely culprit unless you have some convincing evidence.
- fibers 1y ago
  I think you are conflating 2 things. AI could be going after new entry level jobs in software engineering. I am not a professional engineer but an accountant by trade (I like writing software as a hobby lol) but this article looks like evidence that IIT grads will have a harder time getting these jobs that AI is attacking. My comment rests on the fact that the report doesn't really reconcile with AI destroying entry level jobs for accounting, but rather this type of work being offshored to APAC/India. There are still new COEs being built up for mid cap companies for shared services in India to this day and I don't mean Cognizant and Wipro, but rather the end customer being the company in question with really slick offices there.
  - tootie 1y ago
    I think the article doesn't really prove AI is the culprit but I think this other article disproves that offshoring is. If offshoring was the culprit why is it only affecting the most junior employees? I think the case is still open but AI is the leading candidate.
  - typewithrhythm 1y ago
    My experience has been that the cheap outsourcing to India is one of the main areas AI is a real disruption. You can go straight to the artificial indian, and get a better result than an outsourced worker with AI tooling. It's one of the most obvious "I no longer need a person for this" experiences I have had since self checkout. I expect that other areas like accounting that use outsourcing are going to see similar effects in a few years.
jaco6 1y ago
[dead]
jameslk 1y ago
How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI? Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges
- mostlysimilar 1y ago
  > AI potentially solves many of those challenges Isn't it exactly the opposite? Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently? Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"
  - ammon 1y ago
    Nope, LLMs are quite functional in non-english languages. My partner regularly works with ChatGPT in Turkish
    - xdennis 1y ago
      My experience: hosted LLMs are very good, but even 30B models you run locally are quite poor (at least in Romanian). To some degree they still hallucinate words (they don't conjugate properly sometimes).
  - jameslk 1y ago
    Language barriers: The outsourced workers I know use AI to help them ask and answer questions about things in English they don’t perfectly understand because English is their second language. They use it to write better English from English with grammatical mistakes Knowledge: True to an extent, but my assumption here is that it would be used to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. Not wholesale doing my job. At least that’s often how I use it
    - osn9363739 1y ago
      I worry things will be lost in translation (maybe would have already), Or the LLMs will fill in the gaps with wrong information, like some sort of weird telephone game. That said, I have one ESL on my team who uses LLMs a lot like that and it's fine so who knows.
raincole 1y ago
It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?
- nitwit005 1y ago
  They've been trying to offshore the work for most of a century now. There are still millions of software engineers in the US.
- deanmoriarty 1y ago
  You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company. Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
  - raincole 1y ago
    I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world. I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work. And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
    - deleted 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ugh123 1y ago
Well good thing we have our best guys in gov't to address this /s

by fibers 1y ago

lazide 1y ago

Yup, 95% of the AI hype is to apply pressure on the labor market and provide cover for offshoring/downsizing.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pipes 1y ago
Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?
- runako 1y ago
  Every executive publicly saying obviously* false things like X job will be done by AI in 18 months is putting downward pressure on the labor market. The pressure is essentially peer pressure among executives: are we stupid for continuing to hire engineers instead of handing our engineering budget to Anthropic? * - Someone should maintain a walkback list to track these. I believe recent additions are Amodei of Anthropic and the CEOs of AWS and Salesforce. (Benioff of Salesforce, in February: "We're not going to hire any new engineers this year." Their careers page shows a pivot from that position.)
  - lokrian 1y ago
    Maybe it's a good time to ask for advice. Which IT job roles and companies are least vulnerable to offshoring? Defense contractors and the like?
    - asa400 1y ago
      Stuff that isn’t pure SaaS. Physical products that benefit from hands on interaction with customers, worksites, and other internal producers. Small and/or local businesses that want someone whose face they can see in person.
- lewhoo 1y ago
  1 person billion dollar company - the new buzz phrase when "democratize" became so yesterday is in my opinion just that.

BolsunBacset 1y ago

[flagged]

seneca 1y ago
I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.
- skeeterbug 1y ago
  Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.
  - seneca 1y ago
    It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.
    - HankStallone 1y ago
      I wouldn't say it's unprecedented, since I first heard about a call center in Texas that was over 90% foreign labor several years ago. But it's certainly gotten worse. I suspect that some companies/policymakers may be trying to flood the market, so to speak, in case importing them gets harder in the future or a bunch get sent home.
  - vitaflo 1y ago
    The difference now is many companies have offices offshore with their own management. This isn’t the old offshore consulting to save a few bucks now. This is company employees who just cost a lot less. Once AI becomes more mature this will accelerate rapidly. Companies are going to do whatever they can to reduce labor costs. Always have.

ACCount37 1y ago

The reports from the usual "offshoring centers" aren't exactly inspiring. It's a bloodbath over there. Seems like the capabilities of current systems map onto "the kind of labor that gets offshored" quite well. Some of the jobs that would get offloaded to India now get offloaded to Anthropic's datacenters instead.

Mars008 1y ago
And some jobs, offshored or not, are just human frontend to datacenters.

the_real_cher 1y ago

This is exactly right. The H1B pipeline has not decreased at all whereas millions of American workers have been laid off.

fibers 1y ago
Maybe for software engineering but not for accounting. I've had to interface with many offshored teams and interviewed at places where accounting ops were in COE centers in EU/APAC.
- the_real_cher 1y ago
  Offshoring is parallel to H1B. Happening simultaneously sadly.

elif 1y ago

Do you have any evidence of this because the rationale seems like a coping strategy or conspiracy theory how it's being suppositioned.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago
Do you have any actual evidence that supports the headline? The article does not. It simply mentions 13% decline in relative employment and then blames AI with no actual evidence. Given what I know about the current state of AI and off-shoring, I think off-shoring is a million times more likely to be the culprit than AI.
fibers 1y ago
Have you seen how the profession has worked post SOX? Did you know 2016 was the peak year where you had accounting students enrolled in uni in the states? I want you to think laterally about this.
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
The entire account department at my firm has moved to Poland. That’s nice for them, but as a US citizen it does mean the writing is on the wall. On the plus side I learned a fun fact. Malgorzata is a more common name than I had ever imagined. IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.

londons_explore 1y ago

> Audit quality will continue to suffer I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer? Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?

fibers 1y ago
Then you would have to think twice about the company you may be giving money to (ie the stock market and private bank loans). That's the whole objective of this. Every company is going to need an accountant in one way or another and you don't really need to follow strict GAAP for management requirements (what else is EBIDTA for if anything?), but it's something completely different than saying: I made x dollars and spent y dollars, here is what I have and what I owe, please give me money. At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.
drusepth 1y ago
> Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer? Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?
- tobyjsullivan 1y ago
  I read it as assuming the deterministic checks and balances are already absent. We have the illusion of determinism but, in practice, audits (and justice) are mostly theatre as it is. From that perspective, lowering the quality of something that is already non-rigourous might not have any perceivable effect. It’s only a problem if public perception lowers, but that’s a marketing issue that the big-4 already have a handle on.
  - 1y ago

tootie 1y ago

Found this article from last year saying IIT grads are facing the same grim outlook as technology hiring in India for new grads has also dried up https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/tough-job-market-for-india-s-elite-engineers-sparks-ai-led-existential-concern https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/tough-... So, that doesn't seem like a likely culprit unless you have some convincing evidence.

fibers 1y ago
I think you are conflating 2 things. AI could be going after new entry level jobs in software engineering. I am not a professional engineer but an accountant by trade (I like writing software as a hobby lol) but this article looks like evidence that IIT grads will have a harder time getting these jobs that AI is attacking. My comment rests on the fact that the report doesn't really reconcile with AI destroying entry level jobs for accounting, but rather this type of work being offshored to APAC/India. There are still new COEs being built up for mid cap companies for shared services in India to this day and I don't mean Cognizant and Wipro, but rather the end customer being the company in question with really slick offices there.
- tootie 1y ago
  I think the article doesn't really prove AI is the culprit but I think this other article disproves that offshoring is. If offshoring was the culprit why is it only affecting the most junior employees? I think the case is still open but AI is the leading candidate.
- typewithrhythm 1y ago
  My experience has been that the cheap outsourcing to India is one of the main areas AI is a real disruption. You can go straight to the artificial indian, and get a better result than an outsourced worker with AI tooling. It's one of the most obvious "I no longer need a person for this" experiences I have had since self checkout. I expect that other areas like accounting that use outsourcing are going to see similar effects in a few years.

jaco6 1y ago

[dead]

jameslk 1y ago

How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI? Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges

mostlysimilar 1y ago
> AI potentially solves many of those challenges Isn't it exactly the opposite? Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently? Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"
- ammon 1y ago
  Nope, LLMs are quite functional in non-english languages. My partner regularly works with ChatGPT in Turkish
  - xdennis 1y ago
    My experience: hosted LLMs are very good, but even 30B models you run locally are quite poor (at least in Romanian). To some degree they still hallucinate words (they don't conjugate properly sometimes).
- jameslk 1y ago
  Language barriers: The outsourced workers I know use AI to help them ask and answer questions about things in English they don’t perfectly understand because English is their second language. They use it to write better English from English with grammatical mistakes Knowledge: True to an extent, but my assumption here is that it would be used to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. Not wholesale doing my job. At least that’s often how I use it
  - osn9363739 1y ago
    I worry things will be lost in translation (maybe would have already), Or the LLMs will fill in the gaps with wrong information, like some sort of weird telephone game. That said, I have one ESL on my team who uses LLMs a lot like that and it's fine so who knows.

raincole 1y ago

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

nitwit005 1y ago
They've been trying to offshore the work for most of a century now. There are still millions of software engineers in the US.
deanmoriarty 1y ago
You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company. Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
- raincole 1y ago
  I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world. I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work. And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
  - deleted 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ugh123 1y ago

Well good thing we have our best guys in gov't to address this /s