From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.
This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
> If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company.
Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that we can build the machine to scale our business with far fewer workers.
How many companies have you worked at in the past where the backlog dried up and the engineering team sat around doing nothing?
Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).
Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
I don’t think that addresses my point. I understand a lot of companies are firing under the guise of AI, but it’s unclear to me whether AI is actually driving this - especially when the article we are both responding to says:
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
It depends on the "shape" of the company. Larger companies have a lot more of what I call "Conway Overhead", basically a mix of legit coordination overhead and bureaucracy. Startups by necessity have a lot less of that, and so are better "shaped" to fully harness AI.
That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
Isn't it, for something like 70-80% of families? Just in slow-motion?
How long have we been hearing about crushing affordability problems for property? And how long ago did that start moving into essentials? The COVID-era bullwhip-effect inflation waves triggered a lot of price ratcheting that has slowed but never really reversed. Asset prices are doing great, as people with money continue to need somewhere to put it, and have been very effective at capturing greater and greater shares of productivity increases. But how's the average waiter, cleaning-business sole-proprietor, uber driver, schoolteacher, or pet supply shopowner doing? How's their debt load trending? How's their savings trending?
There’s a difference between a collapse and a slowdown. We don’t need a collapse for hiring to slow down [1,2]. I think we’re finally just seeing the maturation of software development. Software is increasingly a commodity, so maybe the era of crazy growth and hiring is over. I don’t think that we need AI to explain this either, although possibly AI will simply commodify more kinds of software.
FAANG realizing that they can't make infinite money by expanding into every possible market while paying FAANG salaries for low-scale-CRUD-prototyping roles has a lot to do with this, and that started a bit earlier than the AI wave.
Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still.
Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid COVID-era whiplash really drove home "maybe we've been overhiring" and caused the reaction and slowdown that many had been predicting annually since, oh, 2015.
Manager gigs at FAANG are pretty rough right now in my network, you can't be a manager when the higher-ups notice your group isn't a big revenue generator and so doesn't justify new hires and bigger org charts, and cutting the middlemen is the easiest way to juice the ROI numbers. If the ICs that now have 1/3 the managerial structure and have to wear more hats don't turn things around, oh well, it's not a critical area anyway, just nuke it.
You can be an exec with 10-20% fewer random products/departments in your company, and maybe 40% fewer middle managers in the rest of them. You might even get a nice bonus for cutting all that cost! Bonuses for growth, bonuses for "efficiency" when the macro vibe shifts. Trim sails and carry on.
Erm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit.
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
There's definitely tone deaf statements from managers/leaders like "AI will allow us to do more with less headcount!" As if the end worker is supposed to be excited about that, knuckleheads, lol.
Yeah I’ve been scratching my head about this too. Like, if my boss said this, I would basically start looking for a new job right then and there. Seems like a good way to drive off your own talent.
In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.
It’s hard to compare, honestly. Last year, my PM didn’t have the AI tools to do any of this, and engineers were spread thin. Now, the PM (with a specialized Claude Code environment) has the enthusiasm of a new software engineer and the product instincts of a senior PM.
This is how it will go at least in the near term. Engineers will be phased out slowly by product/project management that will prompt the tool instead of the tech lead for the changes they want.
And in the longer term those people will also get deprecated.
Then any company that was staffed at levels needed prior to the arrival of current-level LLM coding assistants is bloated.
If the company was person-hour starved before, a significant amount of that demand is being satisfied by LLMs now.
It all depends on where the company is in the arc of its technology and business development, and where it was when powerful coding agents became viable.
When you work long enough you'll find it. Places where changing software is risky you can end up waiting for approvals. Places where another company purchased yours or you are getting shutdown soon and there is no new work. Sometimes you end up on a system that they want to replace but they never get around to it.
Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both have challenges.
Outside of purchased-and-being-shutdown, these are still frequently "we want to do things but we're scared of breaking things" situations, not "we don't want to do anything." Even if the things they want to do are just "we want to move off this 90s codebase before everyone who knows how it works is dead."
In that sort of high-fear, change-adverse environment "get rid of all the devs and let the AI do it" may not be the most compelling sales pitch to leadership. ("Use it to port the code faster so we can spend more time on the migration plan and manual testing" might have better luck.)
That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena like the hedonic treadmill.
Ideal state for every company is to have minimum input costs with maximum output costs. Labor always gets cut out of the loop because it’s one of the most expensive input costs.
At the risk of being the person who says, "it's capitalism," (I know I know).... When making profit is the dominant intent of a company, a worker doing something faster doesn't lead to the worker doing less. It leads to the worker producing more in the same time. If doing more yields too much of the thing produced for the market to handle, the company either A. creates more need for the more produced (fabricate necessity), or B. creates a new need for a new thing, and a new thing for you to produce. There's no getting off the wheel for the worker in capitalism.
