>>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.
> 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.
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.
>>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.
Again I don't know what people mean when they say it will get more expensive. This is a wrong way of looking at the issue.
Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage, or that iPhones are/were more expensive than button phones. You can cite so many such examples. Like photocopying machines, or cameras, or wrist watches, or even things like radio, television etc.
More importantly, sometimes how you do things change. And that changes how you go about your life in a very fundamental way.
That is what internet was about when it first came out, thats what internet search, online maps, or search etc etc were.
AI will change how you go about living your life, in a very fundamental way.
> Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage
Basic car ownership can be quite a bit cheaper than a horse + carriage.
The horse will probably eat $10-20/day in food. $600/mo in just food costs. Not including vet bills and what not.
A decent and cheap horse will probably cost you $3k up front. Add in several thousand dollars more for the carriage.
A horse requires practically daily maintenance. A carriage will still require some maintenance.
A horse requires a good bit more land, plus the space to store the carriage. Plus, all the extra time and work mounting and unmounting your horse whenever you need to go.
A horse and carriage isn't really cheaper than a cheap car and way less functional.
Theres a 3 point way to say this. Usually technology:
* More efficient
* Higher Quality
* Less effort
Most successful technologies provide multiple of these benefits. What is terrible, and the direction we are going right now, is that these new systems (or offshoring like we are talking about here) seem/are "Less Effort" but do not hit the other two axioms. This is a very dangerous place to be.
People would rather be lazy than roll their sleeves up and focus, especially in our attention diverting world.
The worry, that is borne out by the pricing of Uber, isn't that LLMs are more expensive than the generation before, but that it's a VC play. Get into market, undercut your competitors until they go bust, then raiser prices. Ubers used to be $1, which was obviously totally unsustainable. Now Uber's only competing platform is Lyft, and Uber is making money as of their latest quarter. Ubers are not at least $10 if not $50 $100. ChatGPT's $20/month looks like $1 Ubers to some. Only insiders know how much it actually costs OpenAI to support ChatGPT users. I will note, however, that GitHub free private repos are supported by corporations paying for their own private GitHub, so it's unclear that ChatGPT's $20/month ever has to be raised with enough $200 or $2,000 or $20,000/month users.
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.