I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.
I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.
Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months.
The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
Offshoring has been a common practice for decades, it works great for some functions and not great for others. Why would it suddenly have a massive uptick in 2027?
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
Hot take: their quality is possibly a reason these people were unable to leave their country in the first place.
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
Remote coordination tools are no longer utter dogshit.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
>Why is this time different?
The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.
AI: actually an indian
Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
I think this is broadly correct too.
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
> 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.