I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.
And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.
IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.
And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.
These new tech companies/existing companies were not here for the first wave of offshoring engineers many years ago. basically, the product/service degraded and they brought the product/service back onshore.
It's a cycle that will repeat. Product degrades, there will be public outrage, then they will onshore the product to fix the problems caused from offshoring.
IMO, things are different this time (as someone who has been in this industry for about 20 years now) and I don't see these jobs coming back.
For one, many of these companies are now used to their tech teams being remote. The tools, culture, infra, etc. over the last ~5 years has all become remote which lessens the shock of going fully offshore.
Two, many tech teams in the western world are already partially offshored and have been for some time now. I know where I worked, a reasonable % of the team was already offshore in low COL countries (India, etc.). What's happening now is just the expansion of that cost saving after initial testing of the waters was successful.
Three, the quality gap between offshore teams and their western counterparts is now much smaller, and AI will be used to lessen the gap even further (along with just throwing more bodies at each problem which you can do when your salaries are 1/3rd of what they are here).
Four, many products/services now have captured markets with strong network effects, which means they can weather a heavy degradation of services with little to no loss of customers. It's called enshittification, and businesses are doing it now because they absolutely know they can, and get away with it.
I think in the very long term though what will happen is countries like India will actually end up with salaries comparable to western workers, so even though the gap might be smaller, the cost/benefit ratio will change again.
That happened during the last offshoring hype cycle as well. Those Indian developers aren't stupid -- the ones who deliver quality work will soon move somewhere they can earn a salary to reflect that, and it will be comparable to a US/UK/EU salary. Companies who insist on sticking to low salaries are left with the worst people.
I worked with some very good offshore engineers. They all left pretty quickly for a job with double the salary, or moved abroad outright to claim it. The only ones who stuck around were the ones whose poor skills kept them from landing a better job.
It's also great for productivity when your offshore team is a rapidly rotating cast. I remember being in meetings where without any announcement, half of the developers who had slowly started to get to know the project were replaced with new faces who had no idea what they were supposed to do.
It is interesting that a similar thing happened when millions of manufacturing jobs were offshored to China and other low-cost sites. Now it has come to the tech industry, and every other industry where it is possible. It hurts when it comes to us. (Speaking as a person in tech in high COL). I hope we will find other roles as people found when they moved on from manufacturing roles too
Yep, sold to DAZN. Who in turn do all their development out of Hyderabad, India. Almost entire tech team locally is gone now with handover done to that team.
I've always found it interesting that on Hacker News, articles like this pretty much fly by without commentary and are routinely downvoted, while articles speculating about the inevitable doom of mankind due to AI generate hundreds of comments and lively discussion.
We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.
To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.
The other bus ending (buses always travel in packs, as any bus commuter knows) is fertility collapse. People are just not getting around to having children. That's a big yawn too. How do you make a drama out of nothing happening?
We're not going to make it to anywhere close to AGI before we see widespread and systematic societal and environmental collapse on almost all fronts due to climate change.
If you're scared of AGI, instead step away from your monitor, put down the techno-goggles and sci-fi books, and go educate yourself a bit about the profound ways we are changing the natural world for the worse _right now_
I can recommend a couple of books if you'd like to learn more:
You'll be glad to hear that the recent sudden jump in sea temperatures isn't caused by carbon dioxide. Turns out it just hasn't been windy enough in the Sahara lately (and environmentally friendly boat fuel may have contributed as well).
https://heatmap.news/climate/why-is-the-atlantic-ocean-so-ho...
People really seem to enjoy the evil/powerful AGI scenario though. It's definitely a fun one. I would recommend reading "Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect", having a nice time with that, then coming back to the real world.
Science does eventually self-correct, but unfortunately it takes far too long to do so.
One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal.
In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
I saw this first hand walking with my wife through two years of intensive cancer treatment. It seemed impossible to break through the ‘not standard of care’ wall to even incorporate low risk adjuvant therapies.
Overall it just felt like she was a hot potato and nobody wanted to put their name on *anything* outside of protocol. Even blood work. She was treated at the James Cancer Center in Ohio and we got second opinions from Cleveland Clinic and MD Anderson in New York. These are all fairly well regarded institutions in cancer treatment. I was expecting strong opinions and got hand waving and reluctance to interfere with any treatment selected by her primary oncologist. In the process of all of this i read hundreds of studies and research papers, spoke with numerous PIs, trial coordinators and industry reps. I couldn’t get any traction for anything and came away feeling a bit hopeless.
After it was all over i started making public offers of $25k as a starting point to just review her case from end to end to assess the quality of her care and determine if anything could be learned from it. The only takers I got for that were lawyers who were hoping to twist it into malpractice case, which I wasn’t interested in.
The experience left me extremely bitter about the current state of healthcare. After a while i was able to develop some empathy for the providers. They’re trapped in a system that mortgages their future with student loans and directly threatens their ability to cover with litigation and insurance. They have to stay on the rails or risk financial ruin.
This seems to be a particularly salient issue in the area of medicine, since many practice but may not actually “do science” unless they’re affiliated with a university or research hospital.
Most doctors are more like engineers than physicists.
They're more like airplane mechanics than engineers. Few doctors design treatments or procedures but they're very careful about performing them according to the right practices.
I just got the horrifying image of a lead engineer who refuses to move on from Java 9 because "it's all you need," but they're working on human bodies. Yeesh.
I just got the horrifying image of a lead engineer who jumps onto a newest JS framework of the day because "it's exciting," but they're working on human bodies. Yeesh.
But the difference came about only due to relentless informed written criticism of scientists, many of whom happily described their critics as spreading misinformation (or similar words from their era).
"Even individual fanatic scientific advocates of the Einsteinian theory seem to have finally abandoned their tactic of cutting off any discussion about it with the threat that every criticism, even the most moderate and scrupulous ones, must be discredited as an obvious effluence of stupidity and malice"
People often present science as some sort of free-floating edifice that "self corrects" through mysterious mechanisms. It doesn't. Scientists with wrong ideas have to be explicitly corrected by other people, some of whom will be random Swiss patent clerks and other outsiders. Therefore you cannot have science without free speech, because otherwise there's no way for bad ideas to be corrected. It's as simple as that. And yet, academic "scientists" are often at the forefront of demanding it be shut down.
Sounds like someone pushing quackery, honestly. "Science-based medicine is flawed and sometimes make you feel bad! Obviously, you need quackery!"
This also paints a too-simple picture, since there are obvious things like the promise of quick recovery if you do simple stuff (cancer being a big one) and the alternative medicines seeming cheaper than regular medicine (It may be the only treatment you think you can afford in the US). Not to mention the dismal state of "Health classes" - I'm a little over 40, and those classes mostly just told you about the parts of the body, the food pyramid, and that sex was bad and would probably kill you through disease unless you only had sex with another virgin.
I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.
There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).
Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.
> I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.
150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith.
Unless you think we had a special good period in, say, the twentieth century that we've retreated from. It did seem to be an acceleration.
But there's at least some pretty amazing biotech going on this century.
I think most every activity sector has the phenomenon that 80-90% of the people/companies in it are a pointless waste of time and money. It's the price we pay for the 10-20% treasure.
> 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism.
First, phlogiston theory was considered obsolete by the late 1700s, so you're off by a couple of decades.
Second, that's not even remotely comparable. While phlogiston theory is incorrect, at the time it was first proposed it seemed as good a guess as any other, and remained a viable explanation for how combustion worked until experiments proved it wrong. What's happening today is that respected researchers at reputable institutions publish results that they know are wrong or statistically meaningless, in order to game the academic system towards awarding them greater respect and influence. The problem is fraud, not ignorance.
What's the basis to believe that this is worse now than other times in history, or on average?
I strongly suspect there's a survival bias, where the past fraudulent and otherwise incorrect stuff is forgotten in favor of the great stuff. So it always feels like today is the worst time ever.
> What's the basis to believe that this is worse now than other times in history, or on average?
We produce more science now than ever before. If you have 10 scientists and 9 of them produce rubbish it won't take you long to read a paper from the one who doesn't.
If you have 10,000,000 and 9,000,000 produce rubbish you can spend a thousands lifetimes reading nothing but rubbish.
Social science != Science. (OK I over-react but come on, the field seems barely literate in statistical methods last I looked, i.e. mean != average for all cases)
Medical science has a massive reproducibility problem largely brought on by the demands and pressures of industry funding.
Chemistry is still allowing us to make better turbine blades for jet engines and Physics is still explaining the weird world of quantum mechanics.
Just because some fields can't keep their facts and figures straight we shouldn't tar the whole of "scientific research" with the same brush.
with the dizzying speed, complexity and volumes of reference materials, the single word "degraded" does not have enough descriptive power to start to be interesting. Its just so much more of everything, so much faster, plus all the factors named here.
This comment would have been more apt a decade ago, but we've already seen a substantial correction and changes to the 'rules' in response to the replication crisis. There's an explosion in the amount of shite published in garbage tier predatory journals but most of that is noise that isn't making it into any decisionmaking
Actually, I would argue we don't have good data from the use of the vaccines. Part of the reason is because all the mechanisms used for reporting things like side-effects, effectiveness, etc. have a litany of confounding variables which haven't been controlled for which could be far better corrected for/isolated with good studies.
For example, when it comes to vaccine side-effects, I don't think there exists a true account for how common the side-effects really are. The most common way to report side-effects (VAERS, and similar national databases) are dismissed due to the self-reporting nature, local GPs frequently dismiss side-effects and tell people to just go home and take a Panadol with zero reporting going on (I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"), etc.
Likewise, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, there are a million and one confounding variables from % of the population that already had natural immunity, covid variants, health, age, seasonality, societal lockdowns, isolation, etc.
Also, it's important I think for us to raise the bar to the highest possible standard when you're talking about a medical intervention that was forced under significant duress (loss of job, social stigma, public/medical shaming) on a substantial percentage of the world's population. We should not be content as a society to come within inches of worldwide medical authoritarianism without asking some seriously hard fucking questions and imposing the absolute strictest and highest possible scientific standards to justify why.
> I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"
Orthogonal to the original conversation but have your cardiologist consultations yielded anything?
I also have chest pain for now more than 2 months after the second dose of the Biontech mRNA vaccine, but the tests revealed nothing abnormal. A few people in my entourage have been having similar symptoms but theirs has since receeded.
It doesn't help that search engine results for anything close to "Covid-19 Vaccine Chest Pain" are overran by both antivax conspiracy theorists and obvious propaganda. I couldn't find concrete information save from a few disparate accounts of similar conditions[1], despite the apparent frequency of those symptoms.
For me it took 6 months before the pain was reduced to "infrequent", I'm back to exercising almost to the full extent now as I was in July.
I received a diagnosis of pericarditis and had persistent tachycardia, mildest strain and my heart rate would shoot to 170 BPM not going below 85 while lying down. Now I'm back to normal and my resting heart rate is now 50-55 BPM.
But we actually don't need the VAERS data to examine if the vaccines are better than the alternative. We do need it to provide accurate labels for side effects, but that is all.
We can simply look at infection, hospitalization and death in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. If we properly match the populations, we can determine if the vaccine saves lives, and it turns out that they do save a lot of lives.
That's true. And I agree that the vaccines have saved lives - mostly, of the old and the very sick/unhealthy.
However, what is less clear today is whether there has been a net positive or negative effect of the vaccine for young healthy people. You can only come to that conclusion if you actually had high quality data and studies on vaccine side-effects, effectiveness in population groups stratified by age, health, etc.
I suspect that the vaccines, mandates, lockdowns, etc. have been a net negative for the overall health of young (<50), and healthy people, and the body of scientific evidence will support this position in the future. It's just cloudy today because it's wrapped up in politics...but the science will eventually win out.
We have high-quality data on the vaccines and their side effects. We don't have RCTs with billions of people, but that is data we never had for anything and can't reasonably get.
Judging the risk/benefit ratio is the primary purpose of the regulatory agencies that approve vaccines. I don't see any reason to believe the claim that the vaccines are harmful for everyone below 50, that sounds quite outrageous to me. There have been adjustments based on new data for the vaccines a few times, e.g. younger people are generally recommended to be vaccinated with Biontech and not Moderna or AZ based on the side effects of these vaccines. That doesn't mean the risk/benefit ratio is bad there, it only means that we have vaccines with a more favorable profile for those age groups.
Exactly. They DID make adjustments to not give Moderna/AstraZeneca to younger people because they had the side effect data and compared it to the risk of getting COVID and realized that Pfizer was probably better at mitigating those risks
Another clear case of someone implying totally crazy things (younger folks without the vaccine would have been better without the vaccine) with absolutely NOTHING to support it.
.. If only we had clear data to make such a decision.
However, collecting and analyzing that data would likely have eaten a percent or two into the eighty billion dollars Pfizer made last year, so I guess there's nothing we can do but trust the same authorities that brought us 'natural origin for sure', 'masks don't work', 'NNVTs don't mean anything any more', and 'Covid isn't airborne'.
Why do you mix mandates and lockdowns in there? What does it have to do with the vaccine?
If you bring lockdowns into the picture, you have to compare to what would have happened WITHOUT a lockdown as well, how many more deaths in hospitals, etc. The countries that tried this strategy have a very high excess death to compared to those that tried to limit human contacts (especially PRE vaccine).
But we have a similar noise in COVID death and injury as we have incentivized hospitals to register everything and everyone as COVID related. And I believe we all know just about any PCR test can be made positive if you use enough cycles.
Sorry but I can't distrust VAERS and then trust the COVID injection complication data added by the same people but now with financial incentives.
You shouldn’t distrust VAERS per se, but it’s purpose is not risk assessment. It’s purpose is surfacing rare side effects for further study.
You don’t have to trust the drug co’s for that, we also have vaccine safety datalink system; so far the only notable side effect of the mRNA vaccines has been the myocarditis in younger people.
> Also your point about PCR testing is not accurate.
Source on that? Because all graphs I've seen show impossible to miss fluorescence around 35 cycles and up.
AFAICT VSD only does specific research at their own behest and currently don't have a section on COVID-19 vaccines.
Btw your link is dead.
I had pericarditis and some immediate reaction, my cardiologist thinks it was partially intravenously applied. Looking at the data on severe reactions from where I live I've been able to obviously tell that CDC must have used incredible criteria for their numbers. At least initially, I stopped caring when it eventually became clear to me that we do not really want to know how many are harmed.
And from the perspective of everyone involved I understand it, I too want this to be over, I too want this to be a safe magic bullet. But seems to me somewhere between 1:1000-10000 have significant heart issues from the Pfizer vaccine, but when we were rolling it out the numbers were claimed to be 1 in 230M.
I’m not going to argue that the US seemed to take longer and have worse communication about the myo/pericarditis issue than some other countries, but these things are being followed up on. The absolute timing I think is hard to discuss with a definite time frame
"If we properly match the populations," - that's a big if though. Without any matching, vaccines appear to have negative value because older people are more likely to get vaccinated, but even controlling for age there are a variety of potential confounding variables like general health, risk-avoidance, etc.
VAERS is for surfacing hypotheses about rare side effects
For serious risk quantification and causal analysis, we have things like the vaccine safety datalink, which links all electronic health records across a bunch of hospital systems, covering IIRC 3% of the US population. The UK has something similar I think. I think transparency in that system (VSD) could be better, but it has the same problem this thread is discussing, that anonymizing the records may be at odds with making the analysis reproducible.
I started developing chest pain two days after my Pfizer shot and actually still experience some chest pain at times now, many months later. For me the pain started after exercising as well.
The cardiologist I went to see about the issue said he's seeing people like me daily.
I don't think anyone is ignoring long COVID and hospital issues. Hospital capacity is discussed front and center daily and is the primary justification given for lockdowns.
Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID" symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms. "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of bad science (and bad science reporting)
And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.
IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.
And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.