8 ms·

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the com

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in retaining senior level talent, to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks and less experienced onshore ones.)

qwertyuiop_ 11mo ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_that_american_airlines_is_offshoring_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_t... https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-story-the-data-tells-the-rest/ https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st... https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/
- soneca 11mo ago
  I was told that the main reason the “Who is hiring?” thread (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the US. Doesn’t it affect big tech companies? Only startups? I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.
diamond559 11mo ago
Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.
- random9749832 11mo ago
  I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-to-india/ https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...
  - Arch485 11mo ago
    It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
    - random9749832 11mo ago
      Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/really_bad_luck_with_indian_interviewers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...
    - alecco 11mo ago
      They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 11mo ago
      >”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.” Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating. Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
guluarte 11mo ago
one of the main drivers is companies like Deel that make it very easy to hire remote workers anywhere and I think AWS will soon launch a similar service
giantg2 11mo ago
Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles. If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?
- sixtyj 11mo ago
  Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management doesn’t have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :) We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I suppose…
  - lazide 11mo ago
    Also, Indian culture has a huge ‘overpromise, then try to cover it up’ issue at all levels. Outsourcers have really mastered it though. Source: lived in India for a year.
    - bonesss 11mo ago
      Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap. Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.
dehrmann 11mo ago
Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
- dingnuts 11mo ago
  sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets
  - skywhopper 11mo ago
    Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
    - lanstin 11mo ago
      Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
  - paulcole 11mo ago
    Sure but if the cost savings is significant enough then there is plenty of incentive to overcome (or live with) those obstacles.
  - nradov 11mo ago
    For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per team member due to additional communication overhead and increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of project management discipline that most organizations lack.
time0ut 11mo ago
My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit, their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based on private conversations with the executives and what is actually happening.
- screenoridesagb 11mo ago
  [dead]
RobRivera 11mo ago
This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good enough after threats from competition is relatively secured. I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup mill goes brrrr
hirako2000 11mo ago
Exactly this, articles of that tone are starting to surface. AI is often the pretext, because it makes sense to replace labour with technology. The dissonance is why those who make layoff decisions refuse to accept reality, that AI does not replace staff. One thing also contradicting the "AI can do it" argument, is that a business's playbook is to rather expand the work force in order to multiply the effect of technology. Yet they lay off in waves. There is no dissonance, just a disguise: Several big tech companies in the US cut their workforce, in the US, while expanding it in countries where talent is cheaper. Paradoxally, junior folks have it even worse. It has become very difficult to land a job without experience, again, in the US. It all makes sense, if you replace US based senior staff with Junior staff on different time zone, and having a different culture, you are left with nobody to mentor and supervise junior so staff. I still can't explain how ending up with more Junior staff, offshore, less senior staff and little to no Junior staff locally will pay off in the long term. I guess I will figure that out, but for now that's one piece of the puzzle I can only call an "economic downturn" outlook.
candiddevmike 11mo ago
Or it's just plain, boring cost cutting because finance is looking down the barrel of a grim YoY outlook. Companies are hurting, and GenAI can't get people to spend more money with them.
com2kid 11mo ago
The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness. Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs. Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed. Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.
- groundzeros2015 11mo ago
  Don’t you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there
  - com2kid 11mo ago
    If construction had kept up with demand salary wouldn't have skyrocketed and the overall cost of living would be lower. High salaries that exist just to pay for high house prices hurt everyone.
    - groundzeros2015 11mo ago
      Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But even if all the construction in the world happens, would you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not a chance. Everyone wants it.
      - com2kid 11mo ago
        A 3 bedroom townhome in Seattle (actually Redmond WA, more expensive!) when I graduated was 350k, and that was already an inflated housing bubble price. My starting salary was 85k at Microsoft. If 20k people move to a city each year and the city only approves 10k new buildings, the city is sabotaging its own growth. Saying "we don't want growth!" doesn't work. Prices shoot up, wages increase, cost of living goes up, the price of everything goes up, eventually it becomes unsustainable and the entire economy crashes. If 20k people want to move to a city, built 25k housing units. Keep it simple. Expedite permits, hire more inspectors, simplify building codes, do whatever is needed to ensure people have a place to live.
torginus 11mo ago
In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'. Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it. But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games. 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it. This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.
- franktankbank 11mo ago
  What dev to do then?
  - WalterSear 11mo ago
    IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI implementation requires is clearly exponential to complexity of the organization. You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of building a business imaginable. And almost everyone larger than you is finding it harder to achieve similar productivity gains from implementing AI, if not outright struggling with it. This is a golden moment and won't last long.
thisisit 11mo ago
A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead. With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.
almosthere 11mo ago
Sorry to hear, as well as to many others.
burningChrome 11mo ago
>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work. Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work. Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support. The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it. Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.
- arresin 11mo ago
  But it MUST be cheaper. I mean it just has to be right. Think about the hourly rate. That proves it.

qwertyuiop_ 11mo ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_that_american_airlines_is_offshoring_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1j3c5in/it_seems_t... https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-story-the-data-tells-the-rest/ https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st... https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/ibm_cuts_jobs_in_us/

soneca 11mo ago
I was told that the main reason the “Who is hiring?” thread (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the US. Doesn’t it affect big tech companies? Only startups? I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.

diamond559 11mo ago

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

random9749832 11mo ago
I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-to-india/ https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...
- Arch485 11mo ago
  It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
  - random9749832 11mo ago
    Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/really_bad_luck_with_indian_interviewers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...
  - alecco 11mo ago
    They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 11mo ago
    >”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.” Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating. Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.

guluarte 11mo ago

one of the main drivers is companies like Deel that make it very easy to hire remote workers anywhere and I think AWS will soon launch a similar service

giantg2 11mo ago

Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles. If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?

sixtyj 11mo ago
Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management doesn’t have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :) We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I suppose…
- lazide 11mo ago
  Also, Indian culture has a huge ‘overpromise, then try to cover it up’ issue at all levels. Outsourcers have really mastered it though. Source: lived in India for a year.
  - bonesss 11mo ago
    Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap. Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.

dehrmann 11mo ago

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

dingnuts 11mo ago
sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets
- skywhopper 11mo ago
  Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
  - lanstin 11mo ago
    Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
- paulcole 11mo ago
  Sure but if the cost savings is significant enough then there is plenty of incentive to overcome (or live with) those obstacles.
- nradov 11mo ago
  For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per team member due to additional communication overhead and increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of project management discipline that most organizations lack.

time0ut 11mo ago

My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit, their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based on private conversations with the executives and what is actually happening.

screenoridesagb 11mo ago
[dead]

RobRivera 11mo ago

This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good enough after threats from competition is relatively secured. I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup mill goes brrrr

hirako2000 11mo ago

Exactly this, articles of that tone are starting to surface. AI is often the pretext, because it makes sense to replace labour with technology. The dissonance is why those who make layoff decisions refuse to accept reality, that AI does not replace staff. One thing also contradicting the "AI can do it" argument, is that a business's playbook is to rather expand the work force in order to multiply the effect of technology. Yet they lay off in waves. There is no dissonance, just a disguise: Several big tech companies in the US cut their workforce, in the US, while expanding it in countries where talent is cheaper. Paradoxally, junior folks have it even worse. It has become very difficult to land a job without experience, again, in the US. It all makes sense, if you replace US based senior staff with Junior staff on different time zone, and having a different culture, you are left with nobody to mentor and supervise junior so staff. I still can't explain how ending up with more Junior staff, offshore, less senior staff and little to no Junior staff locally will pay off in the long term. I guess I will figure that out, but for now that's one piece of the puzzle I can only call an "economic downturn" outlook.

candiddevmike 11mo ago

Or it's just plain, boring cost cutting because finance is looking down the barrel of a grim YoY outlook. Companies are hurting, and GenAI can't get people to spend more money with them.

com2kid 11mo ago

The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness. Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs. Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed. Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.

groundzeros2015 11mo ago
Don’t you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there
- com2kid 11mo ago
  If construction had kept up with demand salary wouldn't have skyrocketed and the overall cost of living would be lower. High salaries that exist just to pay for high house prices hurt everyone.
  - groundzeros2015 11mo ago
    Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But even if all the construction in the world happens, would you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not a chance. Everyone wants it.
    - com2kid 11mo ago
      A 3 bedroom townhome in Seattle (actually Redmond WA, more expensive!) when I graduated was 350k, and that was already an inflated housing bubble price. My starting salary was 85k at Microsoft. If 20k people move to a city each year and the city only approves 10k new buildings, the city is sabotaging its own growth. Saying "we don't want growth!" doesn't work. Prices shoot up, wages increase, cost of living goes up, the price of everything goes up, eventually it becomes unsustainable and the entire economy crashes. If 20k people want to move to a city, built 25k housing units. Keep it simple. Expedite permits, hire more inspectors, simplify building codes, do whatever is needed to ensure people have a place to live.

torginus 11mo ago

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'. Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it. But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games. 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it. This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.

franktankbank 11mo ago
What dev to do then?
- WalterSear 11mo ago
  IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI implementation requires is clearly exponential to complexity of the organization. You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of building a business imaginable. And almost everyone larger than you is finding it harder to achieve similar productivity gains from implementing AI, if not outright struggling with it. This is a golden moment and won't last long.

thisisit 11mo ago

A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead. With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.

almosthere 11mo ago

Sorry to hear, as well as to many others.

burningChrome 11mo ago

>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work. Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work. Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support. The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it. Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.

arresin 11mo ago
But it MUST be cheaper. I mean it just has to be right. Think about the hourly rate. That proves it.