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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

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Imo it's almost the other way around.

If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money

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>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.

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To semi-quote a higher up at $dayJob, at BigTech, talking to his directors: "If your engineers aren't fungible you're bad at your jobs".

Everyone should just be a small cog in a big machine.

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But that's just good management. You can't have your organization struggle because someone gets hit by a bus or quits suddenly.
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> good management

I'm not sure I'd apply "good" as a modifier. Being generous, maybe "mediocre."

Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job.

I have a feeling that LLMs are going to drastically improve the baseline quality of software. The top end will always require exceptional human involvement, but it will look different.

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I disagree. As a manager you're better off accepting a little lower level of productivity from your best employees if it means you don't have embarrassing, to higher management but also to customers, lapses in productivity.
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Hm. To me there's a difference between handling the bus factor: make sure several people on the team knows about things, and fungible engineers: can move engineers between products.
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Is there? When someone gets hit by a bus you can't just move another team member into that job; you need to bring someone in from the outside. There has to be some level of fungibility for that to happen.
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yeah, most large employers think like that.

it remains to be seen if thats going to be the way in ~10 years after the dust has settled.

i suspect those middle managers will try to fight tooth and nail to hold onto that status quo, because it leaves them with all the power.

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Fungibility is tangential to the sort of culture shift I'm talking about.
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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.
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Right. Are you the offshore worker in question?

And even if delegating thinking to the offshore worker to delegate thinking to Claude ... why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

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> why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

because for entire companies, due to outsourcing, there is no other team to delegate to?

Who's the engg. team who writes the website for Best Buy, Target, eBay, Paypal?

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The argument is that with AI companies might reconsider outsourcing / offshoring in the first place.
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