I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally.

To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly.

The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.

This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough

most businesses dont actually have an infinite amount of work that has extremely high ROI. every new project at google for example has to justify the engineering spend of developing a product that has comparable margin to the ad business. Why spend 10 million a year of engineering resources on a new product that might 1. completely fail or 2. be a decent product with 20% margins when they could do nothing and keep raking in 90% margins from the ads business.

That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster.

On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more business.

I wonder what the parallels are to past automations. When part producing companies moved from manual mills to CNC mills, did they fire a bunch of people or did they make more parts?

You need certain company culture, to be able to scale up, and to capture this value. Most companies can not just add new developers.

AI needs documentation, automation, integration tests... It works very well for remote first company, but not for in-face informal grinding approach.

Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"!

Does that extra work bring in more revenue? I think that’s the key question.

Because hiring less while getting more done increases margins. Your company is not for profit so doesnt care about margins. Others do.

These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.

I’ve been screaming this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212237

It’s refreshing to see the same sentiment from so many other people independently here.

The problem becomes if you are a service like Youtube, where you already have capture almost the entire customer base.

Yes, it's the lump of labor fallacy.

Doesn't exclude the possibility of short term distribution, though.

You would need to expand your capacity to find and define the work. I imagine that would be a major challenge.

> Just do more work, get more done

That's one of the reasons why I am terrified, because it can lead to burn out, and I personally don't like to babysit bunch of agents, because the output doesn't feel "mine", when its not "mine" I don't feel ownership.

And I am deliberately hitting the brake from time to time not to increase expectations, because I feel like driving someone else's car while not understanding fully how they tuned their car (even though I did those tunings by prompting)

I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces).

Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs.

But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).