I think it is more likely SWE thought they were not replaceable where any function in a company is replaceable with enough motivation (whether wise or not).
The other issue I’ve been mulling over is two part. What in the hell have all these SWEs been actually doing? (As in, what software were the vast majority contributing to?) By extension, were many of these projects critical to the bottom line?
I guess what I’m getting at is if you can have a robot do a sloppy job of what you were doing before, and have that still be ok for the organization, maybe what you were doing in the first place wasn’t critical.
I’m not saying it’s not short sighted (I think many orgs are subjugating themselves to external entities, and are going to be violently bit in the ass when suddenly no one left in the firm has any comprehension of how all of their systems work), but, and I don’t say this lightly, maybe the SWE “profession” has a bit of bloat it can afford to shed?
I've remarked on this before: IT Departments seem practically designed to obfuscate the actual cost of development. The discourse online very rarely has numbers against it. My theory as to why this is is that firms really don't want devs to know how much they budget for a dev, and so they structure the organisation to hide that information.
Oh boy do I have opinions (mostly in line with your’s), but I actually think there’s another factor of “Devs left to the own devices will still write software.” It’s a “problem solving” skill set with a very low ceiling for implementation. That problem solving ends up as more internally developed (or newly integrated third party) applications that end up in the operational critical path, that now also need to be supported.
It’s something like a cargo cult. We have this system because of course we need this system and it “insists upon itself”.
The further development is removed from the final “product” of the company the more this crap piles up.
So, I agree that in some instances it’s intentionally obfuscated, but there are others where the bloat simply cannot be calculated.
The other issue I’ve been mulling over is two part. What in the hell have all these SWEs been actually doing? (As in, what software were the vast majority contributing to?) By extension, were many of these projects critical to the bottom line?
I guess what I’m getting at is if you can have a robot do a sloppy job of what you were doing before, and have that still be ok for the organization, maybe what you were doing in the first place wasn’t critical.
I’m not saying it’s not short sighted (I think many orgs are subjugating themselves to external entities, and are going to be violently bit in the ass when suddenly no one left in the firm has any comprehension of how all of their systems work), but, and I don’t say this lightly, maybe the SWE “profession” has a bit of bloat it can afford to shed?