Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them. Their organizations are unfortunately highly optimized to entrench themselves, and no VP’s want to take what from their perspective is a risk to hire expensive onshore contractors or just let someone internal give it a shot.

AI has been a huge disruption to that status quo though because it enables people like me that were stuck managing these bozos to just do the thing on a timeline that wasn’t feasible before. AI also removed any excuses these people could make for never getting anything done. It exposes clearly for anyone tangentially involved in these projects that the devs often can’t even begin to understand the problems they are trying to solve.

With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, it’s easier and more effective to just give that (often much less detail tbh) to GitHub Copilot or Claude.

It has massively changed the game for me and helps me enjoy my job quite a bit more.

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em-bee a day ago | parent | next [-]

Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them.

so actually it sounds like coder management was the bottleneck, not coding itself.

	▲	phoghed a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, management is always the bottleneck then. But somehow more coding productivity allowed us peons to outpace bad management and ultimately change their shitty strategy from India to Eastern Europe. Laundered through Accenture, wipro, et al still of course.

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hobo123 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, quality matters. Many offshore devs would stumble over their own legs. Near shore was much better (Eastern Europe), local German devs even better, and if you got a _good_ dev, they'd easily code at 10x of an average coder.

So no wonder AI is a huge improvement over whatever most organizations did to code something up.

Corollary: this mostly affected "business" software. Anything interesting meant good devs were already gravitating to it, so the SW would be vastly higher quality (think many Silicon valley shops).

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le-mark 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive,

It’s funny because when I managed an offshore team I did the same thing. And just like with llm I stopped looking at their code. It was a waste of time asking them to fix it because they’d just fix slop with slop. At least llms understand concurrency and don’t introduce data races!