Article dated June 2025

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It says they’d been tricking investors for 8 years, we’ll before ChatGPT. I assume they overpromised in the early years, leveraging labor as a “stopgap” for the developing AI. Then things eventually caught up and they couldn’t deliver, leading to the current situation.

      Eight years is a long time, so who was “duped” when can really change the narrative of the headline.

  • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Outsourced Indian dev code was shit 20 years ago. So now it can be shit again. Progress.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Offshored/outsourced code is generally shit regardless of where it comes from.

      Question is generally 'how is it that using this company thousands of miles away is so much cheaper? Business folks like to think it’s just because the country is poor, but no, the answer is that it is a grift. It is always a grift.

      The good developers in that location? They are too busy doing work for real companies paying real money. Maybe less than an American makes, but not as dramatic as management imagines. So companies looking to offshore will never pay enough to get the actual talent in a geography. What happens when someone competent actually lands in one of these arrangements? Gone in 3-4 months after they get a real job after proving themselves.

      So what developers are you getting? People who probably had the equivalent of a high school programming course and didn’t really get it, but there’s a company that will pay money to anyone with some arbitrary ‘certiificate’ that they can claim to clients means you are a trained software developer. They don’t know your use case, and they don’t care. They utterly fail at being competent, but who is going to call them on it? Management has no clue, and besides, it was their idea to outsource, so it has to be a good idea. Leftover technical talent that you kept on as a skeleton crew to supervise the outsourced effort? Oh they are just whining and trying to protect their jobs and being overly dismissive of the offshored staff because it suites their self-interest.

      Offshoring is a big old grift wherever they set up shop.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      But now instead of blaming a junior dev they can hit you with the, “Our apologies for this issue - we are modifying the prompts for the model and re-running in-unit AI tests, will revert back to you”, and charge slightly more.

  • Meron35@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    AI = Actually Indians

    I feel conflicted. On one hand, the underpaid work often carried out by Indians is getting recognised. On the other, this is also saying that the collective work of 700 Indians is no different to AI slop.

    • Darohan@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Well, look at this way. If I were being paid as little as they probably were to do what they were being asked to do whilst also not getting recognized for my contributions as a human and also being treated like machine by people who don’t even speak the same first language as me, I would probably put out pretty sloppy work too.

  • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    They should have noticed something was wrong when the company asked for iTunes gift cards as payment