this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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This is temporary, they will lose all of their infrastructure and come back to comp sci majors after the code gets completely fucked. Trust me these companies can only think in short term which is why so many times they should have lost everything but Government socialism takes care of that.
That's not government socialism you digbat. That's called neoliberalism!
Not neoliberalism because the government is a part of the free market. Socialism practices apply in capitalism directed by the government and thats the complete opposite of the free market.
What are you talking about? Classical liberalism called for laissez-faire free market practices with minimum intervention. Neoliberalism is centered around austerity and direct state intervention in capital affairs through bailouts and other measures.
Socialism is an entirely different form of social production.
The complete opposite where the fuck are you getting this? https://www.britannica.com/money/neoliberalism
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/neoliberalisms-bailout-problem/
The REALITY of NEOLIBERALISM is that it REQUIRES government intervention through bailouts to FUCKING SURVIVE.
If your theoretical economic system can't survive without bailouts when put into practice then bailouts ARE A FEATURE of your economic system.
There are two things going on here causing confusion and the first is the misuse and misunderstanding of the word socialism. DeathsEmbrace is using it to mean something more like the "nordic model" safety net thing but applied to the corporations. It's incorrect but it's a common early leftist pitfall. It's the "socialism for the bourgeoisie/corporations but not for the workers" thing. It's not actually incorrect analysis - the government does provide a social safety net for the bourgeoisie and will always come to their rescue in a capitalist country. That is true, but it's a misnomer and misleading to call this "government socialism" or "socialism for the rich" because socialism is not "government does stuff" or "government comes to the rescue," rather it's worker control over the means of production. "Socialism for the owners" is nonsensical when you actually understand these terms. As Marxists we know this is simply how capitalism works and is not a special case within capitalism that is only just now happening with things like the 2008 bailouts. Again, it's not wrong pointing out that the state rescued all the banks to the detriment of working people while simultaneously refusing to help the working people. But it's a mistake to associate that with the word socialism, even in a "socialism for the rich" sort of way, a mistake that is often made because the general public were never educated about what socialism really is.
The other issue is the difference between what capitalists say neoliberalism is (when they even use the word neoliberalism, which is less often since it is usually a pejorative) and what neoliberalism actually is. This means there are going to be conflicting definitions. RedWizard is absolutely right that it is very much about further leveraging the state on the behalf of capital to more completely dominate over labor. As Marxists we know they were always doing this, but neoliberalism is still a ramping up using new policies specifically tailored to better addressed the the world order given modern global imperialism. DeathsEmbrace is just plain wrong here if they think neoliberalism is simply ultra laissez-fair capitalism. Neither side defines it like that.
Not to be too pedantic, but the first quote RW used actually backs up DE's mistaken position. RW is right of course, but that quote is not a good one to use to prove the point. "Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as [...] reducing [...] state influence in the economy." That definition you quoted is doing the "reducing big government" thing. They want us to think their neoliberal policies are "keeping big government from controlling the free economy!" after all, big government control is what they want you to think the "totalitarian" communists do, when in fact the ruling class is of course using the government to control the economy, just on behalf of and for the benefit of themselves, the capitalists.
I know that you know all this, RedWizard, and I'm not trying to educate you on any of it, I just saw an argument going on that I think might boil down to mostly semantics. I am just trying to sus out those semantic differences and maybe help out any lurkers, especially from other instances, who don't necessarily know this stuff.
As for you, @DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee, humans can and do "do economy" just fine, even brilliantly in some cases. Some of them "do economy" such that it further enriches a tiny select few, and some of them "do economy" to uplift a population and increase the quality of life of the masses. Both have been done with great success.
Oh STFU. I was trying to be charitable, even generous regarding your misunderstandings because I thought you might be a new leftist who means well. Maybe I was wrong. Either way, you're clearly the one here who needs an education, even on such basics as the meaning of the words you're trying to use.
Thank you! I appreciate this. I do know all this, but at the time, didn't have the capacity to express it all. Shouldn't engage with nerds while also trying to do other things I guess, haha.
I appreciate the effort posting
Capitalism is shit in reality if you want to talk about reality humans cant do economy and they never have don't take this argument to "reality" or you're axbout to get an education on what the real purpose of rich communism is.
New tagline.
Hey man, I think you're on the right track, but you just haven't really done the reading necessary to see the forest for the trees. Good luck with that.
https://www.britannica.com/posting/cringe
Oh holy shit lmao this person is serious. WE GOT A LIVE ONE, FOLKS!
lol an encyclopedia link. are you in high school
Hell yeah, love too know what words mean
what
you're a stupid asshole
Cope, the offshored coders taking the jobs are just as good at a quarter of the pay
People are really depending on this round of offshoring going like the previous rounds, but where that failed is that by the time it was viable a lot of talent from the eastern bloc and India had been poached and working in the US. I think there’s a more conscious effort this time to not drain talent from outside the US in order to have as large of a salary gap as possible, without producing lower quality work. Also, coding is significantly easier now, like I feel programmers of the 90s to the early 00s are genuinely less replaceable than modern programmers.
Yea, companies are now opening a ton of massive offices in those foreign countries and having actual teams together now instead of trying to tightly integrate a few of them into American teams
I don't think coding became easier, it became more difficult imo but it's just more accessible and the difficulty has shifted to frameworks and massive scalable systems rather than lower level hardware knowledge. In the past only the wealthy could afford the hardware and get to know it deeply but most schmucks now can learn how to use AWS or Databricks
I feel like this is a big factor in why offshoring didn't work in the past but probably will this time
(pure speculation with no real data to back it up) like back in the early 2000s, all those indian programmers would likely have been people who purely learned in college because they didn't have a computer at home to practice, so of course they weren't that great. but now in the 20s, computers are cheap and ubiquitous enough that a significant amount of those same types of people do have computers at home, which means they'd be able to get more hands on experience and can now perform just as well as the westoids.
This doesn't account for my many peers who studied compsci with access to computers all their lives and suck at it, or some people who I met who never programmed until compsci and were great at it.
I think comp sci's difficulty parallels math. Lots of people say math is too hard but IMO it's really a matter of effort, or lack of it. Or people lack confidence that they can actually do it and then internalize the belief that they're no good at it. Also, US education sucks. But the key diff between studying math and comp sci is that for many years (and still to this day, really) programming paid extremely well and therefore attracts the gamut of people with genuine interest or talent for it to people who are only in it for the money and couldn't program a fizzbuzz without AI assistance, and everyone between.
Well sure, mere exposure doesn’t create skill. But the point I’m getting at is that without it it’s harder to get good at programming, and it’s likely increased significantly for people in poorer countries over the last couple decades. So some, maybe not all but enough, gained the ability to learn how to code the way westerners of previous generations were able to.
I suspect but don't know how to validate that it's the Indian firms overselling the savings. They could get extremely competent people by charging 60% of a western salary, paying 40% and pocketing the difference. Instead, they lowball those numbers to the point where their teams are stretched thin and don't know what they're doing, yielding bad results that are on par with all the other Indian firms doing the same thing. If capitalism worked as advertised, somebody could found NonGarbageCorp, set more realistic expectations around cost savings, attract the most competent technical remote workers, deliver great things and become immensely rich. But it would take a serious investment of capital and time to establish a reputation while western firms suspect them of secretly being GarbageCorp32849327, so the people who could pull off NonGarbageCorp just launch GarbageCorp32849327 instead.
I work with plenty of programmers from Latin America who make a third of what American programmers are paid, speak fluent English, and work harder with better code. Can't imagine it's a trend that will slow down.
Yea one of the best devs I've worked with were Latin America. TFW a guy living in the mountains an hour away from Santiago knows Kafka and AWS better than everybody else
I don't think I've seen them work harder though. They were all very strict about 40 hours and were very aware of the class dynamics of boss and worker. Americans who have drank the Kool aid and obsessed with job titles and career prestige worked the hardest in my experience, closely followed by Chinese workers
It's a similar story with South Africa, which is why I think the US wants to get a deal that exempts US companies from certain labour laws and taxes, with a focus on affirmative action laws and policies, called BEE (black economic empowerment), at least as a media narrative. You have a lot of people that have been educated in STEM at local top schools and universities who are already integrated into "western culture" and use English as a lingua franca, who would do almost anything to work for a multinational corporation based in the USA, given the high levels of unemployment and youth unemployment (30% and 50% respectively), and the uncompetitive nature of South African industry on the global market. They could pay them a third or a quarter of what these high level workers earn in the US and they'd still live like kings and queens in South Africa. The "lucky ones" can even get to immigrate to the USA!