AI Isn't Replacing Jobs. AI Spending Is

IMO the most likely way to soak up the extra capacity is actually yet another iteration of AI rather than say, doing productive but boring work with any other techniques for curing disease or something. Still, a crash and a next iteration might be more likely to involve fresh ideas on architecture, or focus on smaller expert models that have less fake results and actually empower users. Right now I think there's a clear bias in research and execution. OFANG does want results, but also wants results that tech giants. Are subsymbolic techniques really the best techniques, or are they just the best at preserving the moat of big-data and big-compute?

Nobody said they don't, but these are very few highly payed jobs dwarfed by the number of lost jobs due to capital misallocation. That's the point of the OP which for some reason got lost in discussions of unrelated issues like outsourcing.

Besides, a lot of the AI investments go to Taiwan and other Asian countries where all of the AI hardware is made which makes non-AI hardware more expensive too - a huge cost on the economy. The recent Taiwanese factories in the US don't change that.

> Surely this would be indicated by a glut of unfilled job postings.

I posted a link about Ghost jobs. Then, you said:

>[...]it is a job posting an employer has no intention of filling to begin with.

GP' comment speaks to recent graduates feeling less engaged. Whether it's because they fail to meet the requirements, or the requirements are literally fake doesn't matter. AI isn't used simply to cheat on coursework, but also to erect a de facto glass ceiling viz fake jobs with fake requirements, engagement suffers.

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.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-d...

https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-i...

etc..

>70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself.

Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.

Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!

Poland [0][8]

Ireland [1][2]

Czechia [3][4]

Canada [5][6]

Turkiye [7]

The expansion of Indian offices is a result of the reverse brain drain that accelerated during the early COVID layoffs along with the EB1/2 backlogs - a number of Staff and above Engineers, EMs and above, and Sr PMs and above who were on work visas were either cut or given the option to relocate to India and start a hub office.

A similar trend happened in other countries, but India being so large means they get overshadowed.

[0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions...

[1] - https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-6-20-amd...

[2] - https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news...

[3] - https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-announces-major...

[4] - https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-announcement...

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-tech-hub-...

[6] - https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-toronto-offic...

[7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-invest-200-ml...

[8] - https://news.microsoft.com/pl-pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announ...

On top of that, both the British and Canadian governments give some degree of tax subsidy and regulatory support, though not to the degree that India, Israel, Poland, Czechia, or Romania provide.

Why should I pay Jeff from NCSU a US$175K TC in RTP when I can get Jane who chose to return to Toronto after living in the US working for large companies throughout her 20s?

A lot of techies on HN really underestimate the amount of reverse brain drain that happened during and after COVID. The COVID layoffs in early-mid 2020 primarily targeted those on some kind of work visa, and a number of those laid off were given the option to take a pay cut but also open a node in their home country.

Edit: can't reply so replying here

> I hear this, but the fact is a 70% pay cut in the Bay Area would simply not be workable at all

This is why we began opening offices in RTP, Denver, Chicago, NYC, etc in the 2017-22 period because we could pay closer to London or Toronto salaries back then in those offices and we had state level support.

All of that went to the wayside after COVID because a large portion of our workforce reverse braindrained, and someone in RTP demanding WFH and a Bay Area salary in a metro where CoL is comparable to Fresno and where we had to spend significant amounts of capital in commercial real estate to unlock tax benefits is ridiculous.

We are fine paying high salaries and TC, but it needs to be justified by actually high tier talent. Think the Netflix model.

Edit: can't reply but every single white collar job provides an employer healthcare plan that is equally as competitive as the public healthcare plans in Canada and the UK.

And especially if you were being paid $50/hr as a new grad in 2014.

Edit 2:

> And I was in Michigan.

All the more reason I would have pushed back severely. It's easier to find talent at scale in London or GTA - metros there have a population larger than the entire state of MI, and with a breadth of options beyond UMich Ann-Arbor.

This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and never gets better, but your costs keep rising, particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left, and will then enter a dubious job market. My son is 15, so if he goes to college, I won't be paying tuition for him until Fall 2028.

The problem is, I'm no longer a developer. I'm currently a nothing working on figuring out "something." I have a lot of skills and talents, but seemingly not many that will pay. I'm looking at any 2yr. training program that can get me certified to do something useful. It's so freaking bizarre to be sitting here with a degree in CS/Math, an MS in Computer Engineering from a very reputable university, and a doctorate in Information Management, also from a very reputable university, and looking at basically doing blue collar work! My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.

I should add that we are looking to move out of our fairly high-cost of living state for a possibly lower cost of living state, but there are complications to that plan, too. My wife doesn't really want to move our son out of the high school he is in. I'm saying that other imperatives need to be addressed before they become full-blown crises. I'm being taxed to death, and costs like insurance are rising fast.

Same for me, except out of high school, and a decade earlier.

That's the sordid tale of the industry. Outside of a handful of FAANG high flyers, pay, in real dollars, has been very steadily decreasing over many decades. But it took high inflation for us to notice.

Now we're in a difficult spot because we feel we need to make more to make up for the considerably higher cost of living, but there is no market willing to pay more — and never was.

NCG - New College Grad

You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking questions!