Comment by maxerickson 2 days ago
Software productivity doubling would be a huge boon for the economy, not a drag.
Of course it's very disruptive for people that lose their jobs, but many of them will get similar new jobs, and the overall impact is higher output.
The FAANG companies hoarded engineering talent for years. It was really difficult to hire in any market where they were located. What I think will happen/is happening is the combination of AI assisted development and reduction in FAANG engineering headcount will enable business transformation pretty much everywhere.
The impact of that transformation remains to be seen.
If software engineer productivity basically doubled as is being claimed in this thread, I think you'd see companies scrambling to lay off everyone else in an effort to hire even more software engineers. They'd be by far the most valuable and productive employees at every tech company and you'd be foolish not to have as many as you can. I'm being a bit facetious but throughout history when a resource or profession takes a dramatic leap in efficiency, the demand for that thing rather than decreasing as is predicted here, only increases since it has become far more valuable & effective.
You can't straight add/subtract effects that happen on very different time scales.
(1) Laying off people increases margins immediately.
(2) Creating new initiatives pays off in years, if initiatives are taken on carefully, not just thrown at walls.
That means even if (2) is happening, the signal won't show up for years, but (1) will happen immediately, regardless.
If all companies fire 50% of their engineers,
This is not a reasonable premise.
It does.
There will be loads more people who will want software customized to themselves and their needs!
The catch, of course, is that there are, all of a sudden, a whole lot more people who will now be able to create that software.
How will it all land? No idea. But it just feels like a bad idea to go long on software development when weighed against the opportunity cost of going long on domain expertise.
For instance, from 1980 to 1990, the number of secretaries doing all the typing and filing in the workforce severely constricted. That said, the number of actual typists in the workforce skyrocketed!
No one lost the need for typing and filing services. Tools, (PC, word processors, databases), simply became more available. Which decreased the need for people who were formerly doing the typing and filing as a service. Now people could reliably do the typing and filing on their own.
Jevon's paradox in action! Exponentially more typing and filing is happening today than was happening in 1976 or 1980. At the same time, there are infinitesimally smaller numbers of actual secretaries out in the workforce today than were in the workforce pre-1980. And the ones that are still in the workforce are doing much different work than they did pre-1980.
If all companies fire 50% of their engineers, how will anybody find similar new jobs? In an ideal world software productivity doubling WOULD be a huge boon for the economy IF companies used the increased productivity of their engineers as a way to manage tech debt, R&D and other issues that were put in the backlog because historically there were no resources for this. In reality all companies look at increased productivity as a source for layoffs which does not translate in higher output but the same output done by less people. Which is a net negative because now you have 50% of all engineers without a job and no discernible increase in quality of deliverables.