Most Outsourced Coders In India Will Be Gone In 2 Years Due To AI, Stability AI Boss Predicts (cnbc.com) 85
Most outsourced programmers in India will see their jobs wiped out in the next year or two, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque said. CNBC reports: Mostaque, on a call with UBS analysts, said that most of the country's outsourced coders will lose their jobs as the effects of AI mean that it is now possible for software to be developed with far fewer people. "I think that it affects different types of jobs in different ways," Mostaque said on a call with analysts at the Swiss investment bank last week. "If you're doing a job in front of a computer, and no one ever sees you, then it's massively impactful, because these models are like really talented grads."
According to Mostaque, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. That is due in no small part to differing rules and regulations around the world. Countries with stronger labor laws, like France, will be less likely to see such an impact, for example. In India, Mostaque said, "outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you'll never fire a developer." "So it affects different models in different countries in different ways in different sectors."
Mostaque reiterated a previous statement he made saying that there will be "no more programmers" in five years' time -- however, he caveated this to say that he meant coders in the traditional sense. "Why would you have to write code where the computer can write code better? When you deconstruct the programming thing from bug testing to unit testing to ideation, an AI can do that, just better," Mostaque said. "But it won't be doing it automatically, it will be AI 'co-pilots,'" Mostaque said. "That means less people are needed for classical programming, but then are they needed for other things? This is the question and this is the balance that we have to understand, because different areas are also affected differently."
According to Mostaque, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. That is due in no small part to differing rules and regulations around the world. Countries with stronger labor laws, like France, will be less likely to see such an impact, for example. In India, Mostaque said, "outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you'll never fire a developer." "So it affects different models in different countries in different ways in different sectors."
Mostaque reiterated a previous statement he made saying that there will be "no more programmers" in five years' time -- however, he caveated this to say that he meant coders in the traditional sense. "Why would you have to write code where the computer can write code better? When you deconstruct the programming thing from bug testing to unit testing to ideation, an AI can do that, just better," Mostaque said. "But it won't be doing it automatically, it will be AI 'co-pilots,'" Mostaque said. "That means less people are needed for classical programming, but then are they needed for other things? This is the question and this is the balance that we have to understand, because different areas are also affected differently."
Oh no! (Score:2)
Anyway
Re: Oh no! (Score:2, Insightful)
Geniuses.
The ones that I worked with all said they were geniuses.
And that is quoting them.
They told me I just need to retrain for some other job.
I hear there is good money mucking an elephants stall
Re: Oh no! (Score:4, Informative)
Outsourced coders have caused me such pain and unnecessary difficulty. My least favorite thing is the habit where if they need something from you, it's a major deal and you're expected to help them immediately. But if you need something from them, you're lucky to get a single sentence reply two hours after asking. And heaven forbid you use a compound list (1., 2., 3.). Generally speaking, they'll often only reply to #3, or whichever part of the question is easiest to answer.
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Well, but that is true of idiots the world over, including homegrown idiots right here in the good ole USA. The problem is that some outfits that you have to deal with are populated ONLY by idiots, and those outfits are 99.9% located not in USA (apologies to places like UK or Japan, with whom we unfortunately never get a chance to deal).
Re: Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't really matter what they are, they aren't being replaced any time soon. I don't know who this guy is but it sounds like he's trying to drive hype around his business to get VC funding. If you do Google searches for RPA the first few pages will be flooded with SEO optimized garbage telling you how great it is and you don't need programmers anymore. And of course, sites like Quora are flooded with salesmen insisting how wonderful it is.
Problem is, they've been saying all of this for over a decade. They also claim their shit uses ML, AI, etc, and they've been claiming that. Needless to say, it's just a ruse to trick PHBs into building their business platform around proprietary shit and the more they invest time into it, the harder it will be to get away from it later, and the more the vendor will charge.
I really don't see this being any different. If you care to notice, all of them, including openai, are building a walled garden around their "AI 'solution'".
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I've actually tried it a few times, it's borderline useless for anything that a quick Google search can't already answer. GitHub copilot does a WAY better job, but it requires you to already know what you're doing in order to be useful at all.
The worst problem with chatgpt is that the code either has major bugs or it just won't even compile. At least with stack overflow, whatever you copy+paste is quite likely to work. And yeah, I've posted stuff to that site plenty of times that I'm totally fine with peopl
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lol.
try within the next 24 months.
some will survive it.
most will have to go back home.
but it is of little solace to the 30 thousand h p employees that lost their jobs.
and the other millions that lost their jobs to the massive rapid out sourcing.
we will see what happens next.
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Don't get too comfortable. They come for the poors first, but eventually everyone loses out in a race to the bottom.
AI is coming for *everyones* jobs eventually. How we deal with that as a civilization might depend on some rather disruptive changes.
Not 'everyone's' jobs are at risk. (Score:2)
I'm almost 15 years 'out' of being a professional IT guy, ended up becoming a building maintenance guy; I've kept my knowledge base up to date enough to know that it would take 2 or 3 guys using generative AI 8+ hours a day to even attempt to program a robot to be able to do my job. Those of us that do work that basically consists of "chaos driven entropy abatement for physical systems while they are actively in operation" will get to keep their jobs; those of you that sit in a chair in front of a screen wi
What could possibly go wrong ? (Score:2)
I'm sure this guy did not offer all of his coders a 2-year contract, to be replaced by their creation afterwards.
If he did not, he is a clown.
If he did he is a moron.
What could possibly go wrong ?
Easy come easy go, I guess. (Score:1)
Re: Easy come easy go, I guess. (Score:4, Funny)
The cycle repeats (Score:5, Insightful)
How many cycles of had there been? I remember FORTRAN, COBOL, 4GL, visual programming, UML, BPML, ... Every one of these were sold as allowing non-programmers to write programs without the need for programmers, and I must have missed a quite few there.
Judging from past experience and what ChatGPT and their likes can generate, I have no doubt that any new AI coding machine will generate tons of garbage that will need more programmers to support and fix than it replaces.
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Absolutely. It’s been fantastic for optimizing SQL queries or writing short short ajax functions, etc.
Here’s one I used recently. “write a MySQL select function that converts column ‘isbn’ from ISBN-13 to ISBN-10.” (ISBNs used to be 10 digits, with the 10th digit being a checksum digit. They were deprecated 20 years ago but some vendors, cough Amazon, still use them. You can algorithmically convert between the two.)
ChatGPT wrote a stored function that worked flawlessly. I
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Is that a serious question? Actually, I recognize your name, we've communicated before about AI, haven't we? If you want to refuse to believe that there's any possible professional use for chatGPT, you are welcome to. Yes, you could google it. There are SQL options out there. The first one I found was clearly broken! Rather than wade through a bunch of that, I typed this in chatGPT-4, got an answer, tested it, and was done in about 30 seconds. I know the algorithm, but it probably would have taken me 10 min
Re: The cycle repeats (Score:2)
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Yeah, always the same crap. Actually writing the code is a minor part of coding. No idea why so many people think coding is easy. Probably some connection with so many people being really stupid.
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Actually writing the code is a minor part of coding.
That's true; the harder parts are (a) figuring out a coherent design, so you know what routines you should be writing and don't end up creating an unmaintainable hairball, and (c) once you've written the routines, testing/debugging/polishing them to the point that they are reliable enough to actually be useful in doing real work.
I'm not sure to what extent AI will be helpful with (a), but I do see an opportunity for AI to help with (c) -- in particular, you could upload your buggy codebase and ask it to fin
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I always wondered what happened to 4GL.
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How many cycles of had there been? I remember FORTRAN, COBOL, 4GL, visual programming, UML, BPML, ... Every one of these were sold as allowing non-programmers to write programs without the need for programmers, and I must have missed a quite few there.
Judging from past experience and what ChatGPT and their likes can generate, I have no doubt that any new AI coding machine will generate tons of garbage that will need more programmers to support and fix than it replaces.
Don't you get that it aims to eliminate people from a specific country only? FORTRAN, COBOL never said it would eliminate Indian programmers. But, AI will only eliminate Indian programmers.
Next, it will eliminate Indian H1Bs. Next, all people of Indian descent. Even the author of the original paper that introduced transformers will not be spared. Imagine his expression as his own creation hands him the pink slip.
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UML was never intended to "replace programmers". The whole idea was to give middle management a way to generate more paperwork (and if your lucky, an actually executable plan for the coders to implement)
Re:The cycle repeats (Score:4, Informative)
This is true, but I think it's not the point the article is trying to make.
By and large, outsourced developers have to be told _exactly_ what to code, in great detail.
The author is betting that AI will be able to follow such detailed instructions equally well. I tend to agree.
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Yep, the author is not talking about capable and experienced programmers. He is talking about unskilled coders who barely know how to write any code at all. And they absolutely will be replaced by AI shepherded by the same programmers that are currently having to go over these all-but-worthless coders' work before it can be used. The technology isn't going to replace "real" programmers any time soon, but it's already cutting down the amount of work that can reasonably be done by the untrained.
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Absolutely! All these hordes of programming languages promising nirvana created more unmaintainable garbage that requires programmers from 3rd world countries like India to maintain. I bet this mostaque dude is just trying to grab attention and sell more "nirvana" to unsuspecting "industry leaders" and eventually send more jobs the India way.
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Better prediction: (Score:3)
Stability AI CEO will be gone in two years due to underperformance. Seems more plausible to me.
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That and two years down the line Staibility AI will open an office in a 3rd world country like India to extend their lifeline a bit more before they are gone too.
I bet we will still be talking about outsourcing another 10 years down the line too. The color, shape and form might change a bit.
Regulation of the IT industry is sorely needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Will probably make the code better (Score:2)
Will still be abysmally bad, but the one time I did a code review for "professional code" from India, I found mistakes in there so bad it was absolutely staggering. ChatAI will likely not have the creativity to fuck things up this badly. Still will essentially produce code that is only good for throwing it away and nothing else.
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Will still be abysmally bad, but the one time I did a code review for "professional code" from India, I found mistakes in there so bad it was absolutely staggering. ChatAI will likely not have the creativity to fuck things up this badly. Still will essentially produce code that is only good for throwing it away and nothing else.
That one time?
Oh wow. Such experience. Such knowledge from that one time.
We must all embrace your views from that one time.
All glory to that one time.
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Do you know how rare external, paid for code-quality reviews are? Obviously not. That was not the only time I saw code from India, just the only one were I got paid for writing an in-depth report on it.
Re:Will probably make the code better (Score:5, Informative)
Long ago I was hired to come in and vet the code in a complex project run by a purported Indian expert. He hired an all H1-B team of very junior programmers and gave them bad support in terms of specs with giant holes and ambiguous system design. The development result was garbage.
The programmers proudly displayed their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts but knew squat about algorithms and UI design.
I reported back that the company was in trouble with this project. The manager caught wind of it and walked me out of the building less keycard. Upper management sent in a second review team and quickly fired him and shut the project down.
Okay, one bad apple, that's no proof of anything. Some years later I was hired at a large semiconductor company and was the only white guy on a project team staffed by the members of a company they had bought. It was run by an Indian VP who was a sikh. I soon found I got a constant runaround by the team and reluctance by them to share design details. For good reason - they had stolen a Chinese company design and were trying to reverse engineer it and make it work. Meanwhile their Indian marketing guy was making glowing claims about the performance of the product though the firmware was totally unfinished. After months of runaround I reported to another VP that the parent company was being scammed and the team was using stolen IP. The sikh VP came to my desk, threatened me (they carry knives in that religion) then forced me out of the building. Months later, the tech news reported that the division had been dissolved.
I could cite other cases in my career but no sense beating a dead horse. The quality at different tech levels from offshore personnel is just nasty bad.
But I am getting off course. Each of these projects was complex, the code was just part of it. But replacing humans with AI coders would not improve things because building on bad specification groundworks given to AI will not end up with good results. Maybe what we need is an AI to help create good system designs, one that can spot holes and make suggestions, then output good specs and module specs for the needed architectures.
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Just how many fake accounts do you have?
Really, your dedication to trolling Slashdot is nothing short of astonishing. And I'm sure we can't get rid of you, I mean, how do you kill that which has no life?
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I do not post AC. I find it dishonorable.
Re: Will probably make the code better (Score:1)
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I never post anything racist and I have not done so here. The matter is a bit more complex. There are good engineers and coders from India. But a) they do not work in offshoring and b) most of them are not in India anymore. Explained to me by one of those good engineers from India.
I would also think that calling people from India a "race" will put you into hot water with them.
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I've found that offshoring rarely succeeds because it attempts to solve the wrong problem.
Writing code from good, solid, testable requirements is not the hard part, nor the expensive part, and it costs about the same, for any given level of quality, no matter where it's done.
Gathering those requirements, however, is difficult, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and, most importantly, communications-intensive.
Offshoring simply adds the problems of dialect, time zone, and lack of domain-specific knowledge, ther
this will be fun (Score:4, Informative)
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AI just copies other peoples work, and reformat it, it does not "create". If AI takes over and no one is ever coding again and freely publishes it on the internet, there will never be anything new for the AI to copy/steal. The entire world will come to a halt and no progress made, no new works, no new inventions, no new programming languages, no new databases, no new platforms or frameworks, nothing.
New databases, platforms, programming languages and frameworks are all created for feeble humans minds to manage their limited brain power.
AI will create the perfect language. It will be so good that humans won't be able to comprehend it with their limited brain.
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I guess that's true. However... I saw another post higher up where somebody mentioned asking for an isbn10 to isbn13 converter... so I asked ChatGPT for one in Java. It wrote it in seconds, and it worked perfectly. Just for fun I then asked for a credit card validator for the big three companies. Worked too. Are they dupes of a something somebody else wrote? Maybe? Probably?
But I must confess that in my career I have known enough copy-and-paste coders to stop mentally elevating "people" to a higher position
Doubt it (Score:2)
AI does not write code well. I doubt it will improve all that much in two years.
Re:Doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
So in-house coders will be gone in one year? (Score:3)
If you goal is to save money . . .
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Clearly you have never dealt with an indian consultant/team. If you did, you'd realize that while these seem like racist comments focusing on the extreme poor quality of indian programmers, it has nothing really to do with race. The reality is they go to "schools" which churn out "programmers" and "graduates" in the same way that America used to have those fly-by-night companies to help churn out certified MS network engineers and developers. Basically, it is an extremely short and shallow "training" mostly
Outsourcing is a bad idea (Score:1)
Did replacing dedicated, in-house system administrators with cheap MSPs result in better-maintained systems or worse ones? Can we really say outsourcing infrastructure to cloud services like Office 365 works better than decently-maintained private infrastructure? Since it became common place to outsource documentation writing and translations, has the result been better or worse? Ha
India has plenty of great developers (Score:3)
They just don't work for the outsource companies.
The outsource companies are all about cheap labor. And as everywhere, you get what you pay for. The quality of the stereotypical Indian programmer is not a due to their being Indian, but due to the type of people the outsource companies will hire.
The good ones work for real software companies, or move abroad where they can get better pay.
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They just don't work for the outsource companies.
The outsource companies are all about cheap labor. And as everywhere, you get what you pay for. The quality of the stereotypical Indian programmer is not a due to their being Indian, but due to the type of people the outsource companies will hire.
The good ones work for real software companies, or move abroad where they can get better pay.
Most of the good Indians can get jobs in the west on their own merits, so a lot of them do. Particularly in commonwealth countries.
India is much the same as anywhere else, you can hire good or you can hire cheap. The difference is that outsourcing companies always hire cheap and don't care about the consequences.
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You are exactly correct. For them, the consequences are that they make money selling cheap coding services. The buyers are happy because they can tell their clueless PE investors that they were able to hire hundreds of programmers for some insanely low number. The coders get jobs they couldn't otherwise get on their own merits. Even the good developers who are caught in such a company, can easily find better work elsewhere, at a company that actually wants to build things. The good companies are able to eas
There are still coders in India? (Score:2)
People still outsource their code to India?
I thought that trend had died out years ago, at least as a cultural phenomenon. All the good Indian coders seem to have made their way over to the West... given the majority of people in the IT industry in the US seem to be Indian.
Many outsourced coders in India compete on price (Score:3)
...not quality
Their low-effort, fast hacks are possible to replace with automation
Actually designing a reliable, complex system is hard, really, really hard, regardless of the language or tools
How Do You Say (Score:2)
Useless garbage coding by newbies will be free! (Score:2)
Someone told me Henry VIII made it a crime to sell shoddy goods. Can we throw the people who want cheap shit coding that makes planes crash in jail please?
Yeah, that's kinda dumb (Score:1)