I remember that era. I call AI today Offshoring 2.0 and put up some citations [0]. I remember how it cratered the CS/hiring pipeline for a decade, leading to the competitive frenzy during ZIRP.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125477

Software engineering work changed. I no longer need to know any programming language. I just tell Claude what I need and it writes it for me.

>Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.

>Now, what has changed?

We did.

The sorts of strongly hierarchical/rank based and "follow the process to our obvious demise" type workplace culture that is normal in big companies in the US today would be the punchline of a derisive joke about government/union/academic employment in 2006. Back then there was a HUGE culture gulf between an office in the US and an office in Bangalore or Manila because they ran that way but the office in SF or Redmond or whatever didn't. But in the past 20yr there has been a push to treat people (more than we already did) as replaceable cogs, do everything by committee, divy up responsibility, escalate everything, follow the process when the process and the big picture conflict because it's "not your station" to think about those things, etc, etc.

You can blame it on academia and MBA schools, you can blame it on the culture that we imported with the H1Bs, you can blame it on regulatory posture fanning the flames of all this, IDK, I tend to blame them all. But it absolutely happened. And now that we've incurred the cost of running that way just by virtue of our workplace culture changing there's a lot less operational cost to onboarding an offshore team.

It seems like companies are laying off en masse everywhere while also hiring en masse in low COL countries. A few of the major corps HQed in my city have announced massive layoffs at the corporate office while relocating the jobs to a new "remote" HQ in India.

I've seen this enough to know where it goes - companies will move mid level jobs offshore, then relocate their "HQ" from a cheap midwestern city to an expensive one, NYC, Austin, LA, etc. Basically, the executives want to live somewhere expensive and cosmopolitan but they don't want to pay normal workers enough to live in those locations.

I think what you're seeing is change for the sake of change. You're friends will probably find jobs as "AI Engineers" at another company who just did a massive round of layoffs.

> swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.

The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.

So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.

>Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have significant customer engineering: architecture, integrations, evaluations, and production deployments in India. It's kept under wraps because the current administration doesn't want their "We need to win AI" to be overshadowed by "but our money is going to India again!" concerns with voters.

The U.S. is having its midterms - it closes tomorrow - and the next two years are pivotal to who wins the senate for the next 4 years. Having it leaked that billions of dollars of domestic AI spend is going to India is going to sink the GOP.

OpenAI has large offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Anthropic is rapidly expanding their Bengaluru office to Mumbai.

India is an extremely large market - there are 4x more people in India than in the U.S, so it's a huge TAM but most of them don't read or speak English so there's a tremendous localization challenge.

India is undergoing a fundamental shift in their economy. They used to be a culture that used to save money before they spend it. Recently I saw a large group of Indian visitors by the Golden Bridge taking pictures and asked them how they could have afforded to save for the trip given the current explosion in prices.

They hadn't saved money - they had taken out loans for the trip. Everyone of them. Apparently their house help earns as much as a teacher in Nonalva, Mumbai (I might have got the city wrong but it sounded like that)

They also focus their students on STEM and are having a tech. hiring crisis (so talent is really cheap). Every engineer speaks atleast 3 different languages, including English and even more local dialects.

Adjusted for cost, the above average Indian engineer assisted by Claude is insanely more valuable than an average engineer from SF assisted by Claude. It's like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs your average US frontier model.

As I said in another comment, $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

Every market has an upper threshold of costs parties are willing to bear and San Francisco passed it where there's now active demand collapse. Companies are voting with their wallets and people in San Francisco are paying the price.