Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.
Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.
With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.
So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.
So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.
(Edit: also my point wasn't don't do it or that this can never work - it was that in this case management simply didn't care about the demonstrable quality problem because the cost of reiterating was so low they could afford to write off the first couple of failed attempts, and this is exactly the attitude we'll get with AI. If you can get something that's superficially most of the way there in an hour with a prompt all by yourself, there's no cost to just changing your mind, retrying, trying other things, all with no pesky engineers slowing things down)
The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
That's the point gp was making. If the big labs all increase prices 10x, the cost of running your own open models stays the same
I rather expect them to go up. I bought a bunch three years ago and a lot more recently. All of them I could sell for 2x what I paid.
Who are these investors subsidizing random inference providers on https://openrouter.ai/ ?
Self hosting is a complex investment. Competitors need an stupidly expensive amount of hardware to enter the scene if they're going to serve SaaS. Chinese backed models can be regulated out of competition. Openai and Anthropic will soon be semi exclusive sources of training data as development happens on private conversations.
Success is not guaranteed, but it is crystal clear that the goal is replacing us and then pricing the replacement as the largest possible percentage of our salaries possible.
It's the oldest trick in the book. Place a heavily discounted supermarket in town, wait for all local businesses to close, raise prices.
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks
I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.
Now that the unbelievable damage is done to families, towns, and cultures of entire regions of the US, they can swoop in and fix it for white collar workers.
Amazing.
You are right though, the damage is unbelievable and it is heartbreaking.