5 ms·

There are developers outside of your country that are talented, speak your language competently, and willing to work for less pay. There are plenty of reasons t

There are developers outside of your country that are talented, speak your language competently, and willing to work for less pay. There are plenty of reasons to believe that such devs will increase in numbers.

HDBaseT 5mo ago
[flagged]
jujube3 5mo ago
Are they willing to work for less pay than Claude?
- goosejuice 5mo ago
  Who claimed they would? Cost of labor dwarfs LLM costs.
  - jujube3 5mo ago
    Because if I want a low-cost, low-quality dev, and Claude fills that role better than an outsourced dev, such people will "decrease in numbers" due to supply and demand.
    - goosejuice 5mo ago
      Perhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it. Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive. Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.
      - jujube3 5mo ago
        My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.
        goosejuice 5mo ago
        Frontier models are pretty good at executing on a spec when all the decisions have been made already. The author reached the same conclusion. It's the agency that the humans bring that ties it all together, which is still required. Doesn't sound like you disagree. I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.
        jujube3 5mo ago
        Outsourcing comes with significant costs. One of them is that it takes time to communicate with the outsourced team. For example, if you want to talk to someone in India, you might have to send an email that they read the next day, because they're almost 12 hours separated from you. So exchanges that would have just been 15 minute chats with a US-based developer turn into multi-day back-and-forths. If you are hiring someone to be the architect of your system, don't you want to be able to talk to that person? That's why even the most outsourcing-obsessed companies usually did not outsource architects. Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude. If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.
yieldcrv 5mo ago
yes, every idea's guy that is pumping out SaaS slop as a last ditch effort to avoid a permanent underclass will get priced out of SOTA subscriptions and have to hire cheap offshore developers again. there are a lot of idea's guys. people with no capital and no skills, but ideas. but for OP's use case, people with some capital and many skills who need additional help, AI is solving a problem in a way that was not solvable before, while improving on coordination abilities and coordination velocity. Offshore developers do not come back into play here.
protocolture 5mo ago
I am sure they exist but they are never the ones that I have to work with.
opsnooperfax 5mo ago
Is that your experience from having hired one, or are you speculating?
- zdragnar 5mo ago
  My last job was a mix of on shore and off, and we had about a 40% success rate on the offshore compared to roughly 85% onshore in terms of people working out, but also a fairly small sample size. Latin American countries have become more popular for offshoring lately as you can get cheaper than US rates but still have the same or similar time zones.
redsocksfan45 5mo ago
[dead]

HDBaseT 5mo ago

[flagged]

jujube3 5mo ago

Are they willing to work for less pay than Claude?

goosejuice 5mo ago
Who claimed they would? Cost of labor dwarfs LLM costs.
- jujube3 5mo ago
  Because if I want a low-cost, low-quality dev, and Claude fills that role better than an outsourced dev, such people will "decrease in numbers" due to supply and demand.
  - goosejuice 5mo ago
    Perhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it. Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive. Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.
    - jujube3 5mo ago
      My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.
      - goosejuice 5mo ago
        Frontier models are pretty good at executing on a spec when all the decisions have been made already. The author reached the same conclusion. It's the agency that the humans bring that ties it all together, which is still required. Doesn't sound like you disagree. I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.
        jujube3 5mo ago
        Outsourcing comes with significant costs. One of them is that it takes time to communicate with the outsourced team. For example, if you want to talk to someone in India, you might have to send an email that they read the next day, because they're almost 12 hours separated from you. So exchanges that would have just been 15 minute chats with a US-based developer turn into multi-day back-and-forths. If you are hiring someone to be the architect of your system, don't you want to be able to talk to that person? That's why even the most outsourcing-obsessed companies usually did not outsource architects. Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude. If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.

yieldcrv 5mo ago

yes, every idea's guy that is pumping out SaaS slop as a last ditch effort to avoid a permanent underclass will get priced out of SOTA subscriptions and have to hire cheap offshore developers again. there are a lot of idea's guys. people with no capital and no skills, but ideas. but for OP's use case, people with some capital and many skills who need additional help, AI is solving a problem in a way that was not solvable before, while improving on coordination abilities and coordination velocity. Offshore developers do not come back into play here.

protocolture 5mo ago

I am sure they exist but they are never the ones that I have to work with.

opsnooperfax 5mo ago

Is that your experience from having hired one, or are you speculating?

zdragnar 5mo ago
My last job was a mix of on shore and off, and we had about a 40% success rate on the offshore compared to roughly 85% onshore in terms of people working out, but also a fairly small sample size. Latin American countries have become more popular for offshoring lately as you can get cheaper than US rates but still have the same or similar time zones.

redsocksfan45 5mo ago

[dead]