Comment by nebula8804
3 hours ago
I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China.
What if AI brings the China situation to the entire world? Would the mentality shift? You seem to be basing it on the cost benefit calculations of companies today. Yes, SASS makes sense when you have developers (many of which could be mediocre) who are so expensive that it makes more sense to just pay a company who has already gone through the work of finding good developers and spend the capital to build a decent version of what you are looking for vs a scenario where the cost of a good developer has fallen dramatically and so now you can produce the same results with far less money (a cheap developer(does not matter if they are good or mediocre) guiding an AI). That cheap developer does not even have to be in the US.
> I've heard that SASS never really took off in China because the oversupply of STEM people have caused developer salaries to be suppressed so low that companies just hire a team of devs to build out all their needs in house. Why pay for a SASS when devs are so cheap. These are just anecdotes. Its hard for me to figure out whats really going on in China.
At the high end, china pays SWEs better than South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and much Europe, so they attract developers from those locations. At the low end, they have a ton of low to mid-tier developers from 3rd tier+ institutions that can hack well enough. It is sort of like India: skilled people with credentials to back it up can do well, but there are tons of lower skilled people with some ability that are relatively cheap and useful.
China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely competitive, and its the main story these days if you want to run a coding model locally.
Thank you for the insight. Those countries you listed are nowhere near US salaries. I wonder what the SASS market is like in Europe? I hear its utilized but that the problem is that there is too much reliance on American companies.
I hear those other Asian countries are just like China in terms of adoption.
>China is going big into local LLMs, not sure what that means long term, but Alibaba's Qwen is definitely competitive, and its the main story these days if you want to run a coding model locally.
It seems like the China's strategy of low cost LLM applied pragmatically to all layers of the country's "stack" is the better approach at least right now. Here in the US they are spending every last penny to try and build some sort of Skynet god. If it fails well I guess the Chinese were right after all. If it succeeds well, I don't know what will happen then.
When I worked in China for Microsoft China, I was making 60-70% what I would have made back in the US working the same job, but my living expenses actually kind of made up for that. I learned that most of my non-Chinese asian colleagues were in it for the money instead of just the experience (this was basically my dream job, now I have to settle for working in the states for Google).
> It seems like the China's strategy of low cost LLM applied pragmatically to all layers of the stack is the better approach at least right now. Here in the US they are spending every last penny to try and build some sort of Skynet god. If it fails well I guess the Chinese were right after all. If it succeeds well, I don't know what will happen then.
China lacks those big NVIDIA GPUs that were sanctioned and now export tariffed, so going with lower models that could run on hardware they could access was the best move for them. This could either work out (local LLM computing is the future, and China is ahead of the game by circumstance) or maybe it doesn't work out (big server-based LLMs are the future and China is behind the curve). I think the Chinese government would have actually preferred centralization control, and censorship, but the current situation is that the Chinese models are the most uncensored you can get these days (with some fine tuning, they are heavily used in the adult entertainment industry...haha socialist values).
I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to not do Skynet if they get the chance, but Chinese entrepreneurs are good at getting things done and avoiding government interference. Basically, the world is just getting lucky by a bunch of circumstances ATM.
Fair point! And I wasn't clear: my anecdote was me, personally, needing an instance of some software. Rather than me personally either write it by hand, or even write it using AI, and then host it, I just found an off-the-shelf solution that worked well enough for me. One less thing I have to think about.
I would agree that if the scenario is a business, to either buy an off-the-shelf software solution or pay a small team to develop it, and if the off-the-shelf solution was priced high enough, then having it custom built with AI (maybe still with a tiny number of developers involved) could end up being the better choice. Really all depends on the details.