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If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business. So it follows that all American roles will be offshored eventually, including ownership of the company itself - or American businesses will be universally out competed.


> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business.

What's the logic here other than "coders are the top tier of the labor market" arrogance?


> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business.

Indeed, however other business roles have a significant physical presence or face to face component. Sales & marketing, legal, HR, and significant parts of operations and admin have physical presence requirements in most businesses. I would expect finance/accounting to be vulnerable to offshoring, though.


If all the workers are off shore, no need to keep HR state side.

If all the high earners are off shore, may as well sell to them with an off shore sales team.

Don't need local marketers if the market isn't local anymore.


> If all the workers are off shore

I forget that HN forgets that many companies don't sell software yet have SWE teams.


Any company not selling software for $$$ is hopefully not paying bay area salaries for their engineering team.

Mid west engineering teams are low six figure or even less. The cost savings from outsourcing a team of people earning 90k is meh compared to a team earning 300k.


You'd be surprised. I live in a state most SFers consider the middle of nowhere, and my friends and I make more in absolute terms than most SF companies offer (excepting the top tier). 90k is not much more than entry level IT pay here, even new grads make more.

Of course, you can't just work on CRUD apps or mobile apps, you have to build up domain knowledge of the business.


Surprising! Whenever recruiters have gotten confused and sent me non-costal job listings the salaries have always been very low (e.g. 140k for a principal level).


Yeah, we make quite a bit more than that even at IC level.

The best jobs are typically not send out for recruiters - people check their networks first, and only go to a recruiter if nobody in their network is available.


Accounting and bookkeeping already is


>finance/accounting to be vulnerable

Aren't there certifications and stuff? I'd think that from a regulatory and legal compliance perspective it'd be better to have Americans handling the books. Say someone turns out to be cooking the books, if that person is halfway across the world good luck prosecuting them (unless your company is wealthy enough to the point where you can mobilize law enforcement to do your bidding)


You only need one person stateside to review and sign off on the work and that person can be outsourced to an accounting firm.


I think other business roles have been offshored for a long time now, and software engineering is relatively late to that party


Perhaps someday. But for now the USA has broader, deeper, and more sophisticated capital markets than every other country and economic bloc. This is one of the key reasons why most of the largest and fastest growing tech companies are still largely owned and located here.



>"If software engineering is not special"

Correction - "The US / Canada software" engineering.

Otherwise people from many other countries are just as good while charging way less.


Real life lore did a great video about it recently. It’s inevitable at current water usage.


Idk, I see it them all the time on the rust subreddit. Like, cool, but my friend, I have like ten brain cells and all of them are in overdrive. I’m not going to remember I have your TUI app installed AND remember the commands to make it work. If I have to use a CLI I just save the command I need in a text file so I don’t have to look them up. Just give me ang button any where. I’m not picky.


Half milligram pills are available online. Wish Costco sold them.


Rust isn’t more complex. It just codifies the things you need to know.


It is certainly a lot more complex than C. Whether it codified the things one needs to know is a different question. I would even agree that partially it does and there are aspects I really like about Rust, but I do not believe it matters as nearly as much as some people might think. For example, no complicated super-smart type system will prevent you from adding a CLI option and then not implementing it, breaking automatic updates and backup scripts. But nerds like to believe that this super-smart type system is the solution for out security problems. I can understand this. This is also what I believed 20 years ago.


“Larry, I do ducktails”

What an icon


Nothing in this world is perfect, but this behavior is less of an abomination than whatever a junior dev on a timeline might write to handle this condition.


Equinix Dallas was hours from running out of fuel during the last snowpocalypse.


Is this saying it was "hours away" and safe or "hours away" and nearly missed a disaster? I assume the latter.


reminds me of "you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor" from SNL...



Presumably they've learned from that experience.


The following 2 years, TX deployed metric shittons of solar and it was growing steadily until the very stable genius axed incentives.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot


Clearly, they spent a few hours too much on their backup capacity.


Hahahahahahahahhahaaaaaa hahahaaaaahaaah hahhahaaaa!!!!!


I'm assuming you interpreted they as ERCOT with that response


The people who live in Texas are completely and utterly shocked every time the temperature goes below 40F. Even though there is some kind of "winter" weather almost every winter, none of the houses or commercial buildings have insulation on any of the pipes. A lot of high traffic roadways are elevated and banked making them completely unusable if someone so much as spills a coffee on them, let alone having ice or even just rain on them. "Winterizing" is just not a thing. It is always deemed too expensive. Then disaster strikes, everyone freaks out, then forgets about it in a few months because the temp in the summers stays well north of 100F for weeks at a time. OF COURSE they haven't learned. It goes against human nature to think more than a few months ahead when the state "rainy day fund" is at stake.


I know of one DC that does government hosting so that they get prioritized to keep the lights on.


Wild! Source?


It would be helpful for readers to know what Equinix is

> Equinix's infrastructure supports the digital services businesses rely on, from cloud computing and enterprise applications to content delivery and financial trading platforms.


They are a very popular "high end" server colocation provider and have their own network with many peering agreements.

A lot of large companies put their servers into Equinix data centers.


An exchange having to stop trading and gracefully shut down their systems for a few days doesn't really strike me as a disaster though.


The NYSE was only closed for 3 business days after 9/11. Uptime is important for listed companies.


It might be slightly inconvenient to people who want to sell their shares.


Not really because there are a lot of stock markets these days.


But depending on the setup, often you just cant "sell the one thing at another exchange which you bought earlier at a different exchange", sure this depends on the country/etc.


There may be some odd financial instrument that can only be traded on a single exchange, but that's generally not going to be something that is liquid enough for HFT trading anyway. The idea that a stock is listed "on the NYSE" and can only be traded there is a quaint anachronism. e.g. https://help.tradestation.com/10_00/eng/tradestationhelp/rou...


I’m working on a project that has now outgrown the context window of even gpt-5 pro. I use code2prompt and ChatGPT with pro will reject the prompt as too large.

I’ve been trying to use shorter variable names. Maybe I should move unit tests into their own file and ignore them? It’s not idiomatic in Rust though and breaks visibility rules for the modules.

What we really need is for the agent to assemble the required context for the problem space. I suspect this is what coding agents will do if they don’t already.


I touch rust every day, but you should also mention the priority of those three things are also in that order.


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