Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | IdiocyInAction's commentslogin

The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

The people best suited for implementing and interfacing with LLMs at the moment are still SWEs and at least for the time being AI is actually probably a job creator for SWEs rather than the other way around. This might change.

And Claude has been invaluable for me to fix trade-related things at home, even complex ones. It actually outdid a locksmith!

The most resilient career is probably nursing. Medicine maybe too, not because it's not technically possible but because doctor lobbies are incredibly strong. Healthcare is the largest employer in most states now and with an aging population that's probably where much of the surplus will go and it's a profession that has really meagre productivity gains (cost disease). So nursing might be the answer.


> The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite

It's an open secret a good majority of these "AI layoffs" are AI in name only, a little lie told to keep the shareholders happy while the real cause is the worsening economy.


ive noticed a lot of recruiter outreach these days. i never used to get any last year.


Most of it is just blatant tax evasion.


Nurses in the US are actually very highly paid. Ask anyone how their week was. They'll all say it was crap.


Writing code can often just be the means to an end which is delivering value.


That still doesn't not make it not slavery. What if you don't agree with the social contract?


Do you call taxes slavery? Same thing.


You can leave?


A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.


Do you live in the same reality as the rest of us? Most h1bs are not competitive programming champions, they are totally average in every way


Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries.

Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.


These people are exactly what H1B is for. The problem is that most h1b hires now are not that exceptional.


I think the idea of shaming people for being successful conquerers is ironically very western. Ask what the Mongols think about their conquests or the Han or what the Turks think about the Ottomans or the Russians about their history…


Yes it is very Western. That national chauvinists think differently doesn’t make it wrong.


I don't know what you imagine perceptions of the British empire to be but most people don't think the UK sent 10000 ships to India to zerg rush the existing power structures.


Not to that extreme, but I do not think people realise the extent to which the empire relied on local support and structures.

I recently read the second volume (Seven Years in Ceylon) of Leonard Woolf's autobiography and he talks about how an entire country was British run with no military outside a small number in the capital city (and many of the provinces were remote, requiring days of difficult travel back them). There were small numbers (single figures in some) of civil servants in each province, but entire districts were run by a single official.


He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.

> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.

Mentioned by the author

> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.

Also addressed by the article.

> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.

I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.


> He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them

I also quoted the author about allies: “Discounting their native allies, they were probably outnumbered ...”

So that qualifies as mentioning native allies. It mentions the allies as being so inconsequential that they can be discounted when considering the forces they were up against.

> and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.

Source?

> Also addressed by the article.

That part of my comment was not about the article.

> I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles.

First of all popular understanding (which is what I was talking about) seems to like narratives of dominating conquest. That goes both for Mongols and conquistadors.

Secondly they have arguments for their theories. That they are “desperate” speaks to their motivation and not the end result of their theories. So you would have to engage with their counter-arguments instead of falling back on saying that it looked lopsided. (Are you critiquing their history or their motivations? Different things.)

> I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.

I would hope that historians try their best to figure out why the Mongols or the Ottomans and whoever won, using a variety of approaches, arriving at the most empirically solid theory whether that is tech/logistical superiority or whatever else. But that is not known to me.


> That's partly because inequality doesn't fit into their models.

Well Piketty being wrong doesn't fit in many people's models either. Economists routinely do talk about inequality and I think it's intellectually dishonest to paint the whole field as wrong just because some parts of it don't agree with your pet theory.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: