The US is not completely centrally planned by a politburo, and suburban sprawl is not a conspiracy of diabolical powers that be. Given the choice, many people with the means will pay a premium and spend hours every day commuting to not have to live in The city they work. Why? There are uncomfortable answers. You can’t make maximizing harm to a segment of the population a policy goal and expect them to stay.
I am all for people being able to pay a premium to get the burbs. The problem is they don't actually pay the premium. Their service costs are often not covered by the taxes and direct fees assessed. Consider water and sewer. I pay the same amount for water and sewer as the sprawl house built out in R1 on the edge of town but my house is on major city services that cost a fraction to maintain, per house, as that house on the edge. I am subsidizing them. And I do it for their roads. And their parks. And every service they use because them and 5 other people suck 20x the resources but pay the same as me. And it makes me mad. So, yeah, pay your fair share to live in sprawl and I will be happy, force me to pay your taxes and imply I'm a communist and I get a little less polite.
Why do you need a mid career software developer to babysit ChatGPT? Why don’t you just use an American intern who’s paid half of what in Indian developer is paid? You just can’t take the people who do your plumbing and get them to design your water treatment plant. If you want someone who really knows what they are talking about, and that’s what you need where an AI fails, then you are just going to have to pay what someone at that level asks.
I work for a global corporation. We have offices in India. For the technical professionals I deal with the wage differential is maybe 30-50% and is actually quite a bit less than the cost of living difference. My personal experience is that there is a tendency for them to massively inflate their qualifications and level of experience to a point that Americans would call fraud. The only kind of people who think this is a good idea are people like Larry Fink, and I would attribute his motives to greed and malice, probably an equal parts.
My last job was a mix of on shore and off, and we had about a 40% success rate on the offshore compared to roughly 85% onshore in terms of people working out, but also a fairly small sample size.
Latin American countries have become more popular for offshoring lately as you can get cheaper than US rates but still have the same or similar time zones.
Enlighten us to these drawbacks. On the surface I am inclined to say the pros would outweigh the cons. Compared to other professions, software engineering seems to struggle the most with H-1B/Green Card abuse and interview processes. Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, lawyers, et al. than for software engineers, and that I believe is because of the licensure. I do think licensure adds overhead to an industry (e.g., malpractice insurance, governing bodies, license management) and that probably discourages anyone with real power (like FAANG) to pursue it and try to set it as an industry-wide standard. Most software engineers in the U.S. are making around $130-140k, but lawyers and medical doctors usually make significantly more (perhaps because of the licensure overhead - I'm not sure if malpractice insurance is included in a medical doctor's salary- I would imagine it's not and is taken out of each paycheck like any other industry's health insurance benefits).
> "Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, ..."
The job interview for doctors is a 5-7 year residency under tight supervision of an attending physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) . People do flunk or drop out as well, meaning they can never become a physician. There's nothing easier about that.
I think the parent commenter agrees with you: because there is tight quality assurance and - in many countries - a license needed to practice medicine, the interviewer can just trust the system instead of having to evaluate the competence of the applicant through questions and coding assignments.
(I'm not sure whether I agree with the commentator that a SE license would be that helpful in practice.)
I wish that there were a Corps of Engineers in the Army, whose job it was to build and maintain water retention structures. I think that such an organization might be our best hope for half an inch of rising water every year. Given that much of the state is already below sea level, that they have not suffered the wrath of climate change could only be a miracle. It must be the work of a merciful God who has forgiven their sins of owning Ford F150s.
This approach has already failed miserably for the city. They just need to move to where it isn't so obviously a risk, regardless the reason of the day, rather than have all of us pay to try to keep them there and then continually fail anyways.
Why would this need to be a miltary organization? Are the sinking lands/rising seas a plot from some enemy? This is a civil engineering thing if ever I saw one. Might want to look at how the Dutch deal with this. I don't think it involves any armies.
The way the Dutch deal with this is changing. The predominant view now is depolderization. Environmental concerns indicate that they should return the land to the sea.
In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).
The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.
The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.
Because if it were civil and paid for for centrally, it'd be Big C Communism marching in. Let the army do it and it's eagle-riding patriotism.
But also if you do declare some sort of emergency that allows this, otherwise frustrating checks and committees can be bypassed. Probably not a bad thing.
Too many people see wages as a sunk cost and a constant. One problem though is AI costs per task are unpredictable, and management tends to prefer predictable outcomes over optimal outcomes.
I would not be shocked if they do that. I would not be terribly shocked that the US-headquartered models do that for another government either. As far as data confidentiality goes, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Microsoft checks all those enterprise boxes, right? Yet, Azure still gets breached once in a while.
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