jselysianeagle

The argument is that with AI companies might reconsider outsourcing / offshoring in the first place.

They're not dead but the competition for them has gotten much more fierce since lots of people are now aiming for that as their first choice now when looking for a role, and with the large number of tech layoffs in the US in recent years, there's lots of very qualified people to find in the same / nearby timezone(s) that are applying to those roles.

I'm not so sure that AI is taking over remote roles necessarily, although I can't be sure.

> I think it is a soft skill that only hours of practice can make you good at.

So this, I think, is the crux of it.

When most people, at least in the world of SWE, think of what it means to be skilled at something, they think of knowledge and experience acquired over a much longer timeframe - months to years even. So from that pov, something you can get reasonably good at within just a few hours or days might not seem like much of a "skills moat" at all.

Interesting, because I hear that argument all the time on some of the CS related subreddits. "Jevon's Paradox" gets mentioned quite a bit.

> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.

I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.

> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.

But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?

Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.

Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.

> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

> The only good news here is that we'll probably only have to worry about getting by for a decade max.

What’s goin to happen after a decade?

> Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training."

For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing.

Additionally, it wasn't software engineers doing this, but people looking to cash in on students looking to get a 6-figure job. They were business people, not software engineers.

> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level?

What skills are being developed by non-devs prompting AI to churn out code they don't understand? Note that I'm not debating if the code is good or works or whatever, I'm asking if any real skills are being developed merely by prompting AI towards some goal.

> When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.

I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.

But getting an answer is not the same thing as understanding why that is the correct answer, or going deeper and learning more about the subject.

IMHO, the people who genuinely desire to learn will trudge through whatever they need to in order to grow their understanding - be it through reading books, original research papers or what have you.

If, OTOH, all you seek is the answers and that alone is satisfying to you, then of course you simply will not be motivated to do it the old school way anyway. But that's hardly different now in the age of AI.

Honestly in a high COL city in the US, having 4-5 kids would be doable on $300k TC but it wouldn't be easy to give them more than a middle class lifestyle at best.

Elsewhere in the US in smaller towns, I could see it being much more feasible.

> But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.

Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.

> Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening.

> What's going to happen will happen.

Username checks out.