This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US.

I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough).

The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing new code without a brain behind it, but once you get to the point where you need to refactor code, you start really needing someone with coding experience to guide the AI or veto it's mistakes.

I don't think that's really fixable even with a lot better AI. It's not something that ultimately comes out of the likes of github data.

I'm not saying that AI isn't going to make things better, btw, I just don't think we'll see a 20x improvement. Probably more like 1.5 or 2x.

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roncesvalles 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for.

The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.

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m1coti 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am not sure this feels right. I agree that the US currently has leading minds in terms of tech, but I am not sure it is too big of difference with the EU knowledge workers. EU is still a lot cheaper then US in terms of wages you would need to pay.

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irishcoffee an hour ago | parent [-]

Sure is an interesting thought. None of this is sarcasm: why do US companies deal with the time zone differences and language barriers they won’t need to bother with so much by outsourcing to say, Ireland?

	▲	regularfry 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The mechanism is often that they'll actually outsource to someone like Accenture, who have teams everywhere, and whose contract managers will try to get their cheapest viable team onto the contract to maximise their margin. If the buyer can't judge the quality of what they're buying, or doesn't know why the resulting hand-offs, delays, mistakes and rework will cost them more than keeping everything in-house ever would have, they're going to have a bad time.
	▲	surgical_fire 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Er, US companies do outsource to Ireland. Basically every big tech has large offices and employ a lot of people there. The limitation is that Ireland is a relatively small country, and most Irish developers are already employed (which is why Ireland end up being one of the main destinations for tech workers being hired from abroad).

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asdff 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Outsourcing of knowledge workers is still ramping up. The issue in the past was the skills were few and far between internationally. Facilities were also not built. That has changed now in a lot of fields. New campuses have been built in places like Bangalore and Hyderabad, even Singapore. The skills are there now, the training is decent, and you can see that the hiring is going on for very skilled titles in these cities. It is a different animal than just 10 years ago in this.

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's certainly part of it. But the other part that I've heard time and time again is that in order for outsourcing to be successful you basically needed an american engineer in the mix hand holding everything, clarifying requirements, and vetoing bad code.

That part of dev work, the requirements gathering, attention to details, clarifying requirements, is something AI also struggles with. A lot of companies basically waste time and money on outsourced devs because without a clear path forward they effectively will sit and do nothing, waiting for a prompt.

	▲	regularfry 8 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the mechanism here isn't that American engineers are magic. It's that you need that contextual knowledge really close to where the work is actually being done, so that the turnaround for questions, blockages, clarifications, "we've got no work to do", quality level-setting and so on is on the scale of minutes, not time-zones.
	▲	m1coti an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would not agree on that point. It really depends on company's structure. I mean it also depends with people that makes the team. I would say there are a lot of unknowns but I would certainly not generalize. How I find your argument is that one distinguished engineer from US could do the same with the use of AI. I worked with both and I know great and bad engineers from both sides. Only thing is that US has a bigger pool of great engineers.