Comment by muzani

"If the productivity gains are so huge, shouldn’t we see those engineers getting promoted super fast or getting rich from building a product extremely fast?"

This is an entirely different question in itself, and isn't really related to AI, but more between productivity and corporations.

Corporations are a pipeline. You have a certain amount of input and a certain amount of output. There is a queue of input stuff. If that queue runs dry, then you have wasted productivity. The pipe manager is being negligent somewhere - either we can cut down on costs by removing the cogs in the machine, or someone further up the pipe isn't producing enough output to satisfy the inputs.

If FE has too much free time, then your options are: 1) pull FE into BE, 2) pull work from BE to FE, 3) get FE to do product stuff like A/B testing or talking to customers, 4) make more FE teams or even have one person in two teams, 5) turn the site into an app or the app into a site, 6) slow them down by making them return to office, 7) fire someone

A Chinese company might have a couple dudes dedicated to answering all questions on APIs and the systems. A Western company will simply not document things or overdocument it to the point that it's too obtuse to read and yet doesn't answer the question. The worst cases I've seen is developing a whole new programming language, which becomes a white elephant maintained by interns.

But the point is, there's mechanisms that kick in and slow down productivity so nobody needs to be laid off. There's also additional mechanisms like engineers being sick of working in 3 teams at once with no documentation, and so they leave.