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0 pointskamaal1y ago0 comments

>>These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted.

This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done.

Bad quality things are cheap != All cheap things are bad.

Same will work with AI too, while people continue to crap on AI, things will only improve, people will be more productive with AI, get more and bigger things done for cheaper and better. This is just inevitable given how things are going now.

>>There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something.

In the peak of outsourcing wave. Both the call center people and IT services people had internal training and graduation standards that were quite brutal and mad attrition rates.

Exams often went along the lines of having to write whole ass projects without internet help in hours. Theory exams that had like -2 marks on getting things wrong. Dozens of exams, projects, coding exams, on-floor internships, project interviews.

>>After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.

Most IT services billing had pivoted away from hourly billing, to fixed time and material in the 2000s itself.

>>It's exactly like this.

Very much like outsourcing. AI is here to stay man. Deal with it. Its not going anywhere. For like $20 a month, companies will have same capability as a full time junior dev.

This is NOT going away. Its here to stay. And will only get better with time.

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Quarrelsome1y ago

> This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done

I used upwork (when it was elance) quite a lot in a startup I was running at the time, so I have direct experience of this and its _not_ a lie or "mostly exaggerated", it was a very real effect.

The trick was always to weed out these types by posting a very limited job for a cheap amount and accepting around five or more bids from broad prices in order to review the developers. Whoever is actually competent then gets the work you actually wanted done in the first place. I found plenty of competant devs at competitive prices this way but some of the submissions I got from the others were laughable. But you just accept the work, pay them their small fee, and never speak to them again.

whatshisface1y ago

There's no reason why an outsourcing firm would charge less for work of equal quality. If a company outsourced to save money, they'd get one of the shops that didn't get the job done.

kamaalOP1y ago

>>There's no reason why an outsourcing firm would charge less for work of equal quality.

Most of this works because of price arbitrage. And continues to work that way, not just with outsourcing but with manufacturing too.

Remember those days, when people were going around telling Chinese products where crap? That didn't really work and more things only got made in China.

This is all so similar to early days of Google search, its just that cost of a search was low enough that finding things got easier and ubiquitous. That same is unfolding with AI now. People have a hard time believing a big part of their thinking can be outsourced to something that costs $20/month.

How can something as good as me be cheaper than me? You are asking the wrong question. For centuries now, every decade a machine(s) has arrived that can do a thing cheaper than what the human was doing at the time. Its not exactly impossible. You are only living in denial by asking this question, this has been how it has worked the day since humans found way of mimicking human work through machines. We didn't get here in a day.

dttze1y ago

It’s not 20, it’s 200+. And that will only get more expensive.

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