[mycentstoo]

I’m genuinely curious on the point about reducing headcount because AI will be more efficient. I’ve seen it articulated here but other places too that a company will be able to have less engineers because each would be more productive. What if companies kept the same number of people engineers but now massively out produce what they used to? And I disagree with the example that this is like typewriters replacing typists. I think typists have a fixed number of things that need to be typed. Software is different - a company that has a better or more feature rich project could gain on their competitors.

Curious if anyone else thinks this. Maybe it’s just optimism but I’ve yet to be convinced that a company would want to maintain its productivity through trading engineers for AI if it had the same opportunity to grow its productivity through AI and maintaining headcount.

[mycentstoo]

And to add-on, isn’t there some market dynamics we are avoiding here with this example? If I’m an AI company and really produced a principal level engineer, why would I sell it for less than the labor market is willing to bear? Wouldn’t I price it perhaps less than the market but not so dramatically less as to lose money.

[frenchmajesty]

You make a good point. The shrinking headcount is not necessarily tied to mass-firing. It's more likely tied to +10M newly trained engineers entering the job market every year, but only 50 positions being opened.

Over time, with each recessions, headcount will shrink at some companies, and will not grow back to pre prior levels. Over time, the line trends downwards

[vagab0nd]

AI can be scaled so a company can increase productivity while cutting headcount. The limiting factor here is available compute and its price.