[htsh]

I know how that works. And my point was not that they should or will be replaced, but rather that they are no less expendable than developers (not very much).

But the decisions they make are one of the things that can be automated. I do not know if you have been inside one of these places but the executives are not doing a great job deciding (at mine they decided opensearch was a better bet than elastic and switched existing installations).

A new regime came in and then bad decision after bad decision drove our best talent away. Consultants, everywhere.

Also, that number is much lower. Full time devs are down, contractors and consultants are up. As a full time dev at one of these places, it felt like the number of executives was growing as everything else shrank.

Perhaps you are right about the highest levels, but think about all of the middlemen executives and what they do.

And even that -- I think an AI could choose to not spend millions on Deloitte or Accenture on software that inevitably failed.