Our industry is equally cannibalised, anyone that thinks otherwise is either having too many tokens or in a privileged position.
If business can deliver the same product with a smaller team, great!
And yes this has been happening for a while, even if not everywhere.
In enterprise consulting, projects that would require a team of 20 devs on average, now have about 5.
Moving away from on-prem, managing own cloud infra to managed containers, to serverless, SaaS and iPaaS ready made products, and offshoring naturally.
All contributed to ever decreasing team sizes.
Now AI based tooling is added to that cocktail, reducing even further the team sizes.
The only folks doing well in the end, are the employees of AI companies, without moral issues contributing to the industry downfall, because the CEO themselves aren't the ones coding and pirating human culture.
For now, a skilled person using AI is still miles better than an autonomous AI building something. I’ve been trying to do the latter for months to build open source alternatives and the end products still lack polish and that last 20%. Maybe this changes, but I still think there will be people who can use that AI to be better than AI alone.
Read the second to last slide. What we need now is *imagination*. You assume the need for new software is fixed and that AI is going to satisfy that need with fewer humans (lower cost), but by lowering the cost we can increase the supply of software!
That means software engineers better start getting creative. If you think your job is to wait for a PM to assign you a well-written researched ticket, you're done. Your job is now to figure out how to make these machines (computers) do whatever we need them to do safely, quickly, at scale, and correctly by applying all your knowledge of computer science and the engineering field of software engineering to an AI prompt.
This phenomenon started to take effect when companies moved into being managed by MBA folks without any role into making the companies happen in first place, the introduction of CEO and administrative board, and so on.
Usually this was never an issue when becoming the one at the driving wheel, was due scaling up the ladder all the way from the bottom, or having the luck of being in the owners' family already.
Disgustes me as well, above all the layoffs only to give the money to the "poor" shareholders.
The price increase (to 100chf) was voted down. I understand the vote too - it wasn't so much as people saying they don't want to pay more as it was people saying we shouldn't be putting more money into auto transport. If they let only car owners vote I bet it would have passed.
Because its not a major source of revenue and not primary income for road maintenance (swiss have stellar overall road quality compared to neighbours), and mostly intended for foreigners to not overuse swiss highways in summer & winter tourist seasons.
This can happen easily due to location of Switzerland. Its true that inflation is basically non-existent here, something about fiscal discipline and overall highly moral population not afraid of work (unlike france or italy for example), and thus also government. Overall country is low to medium tax place so vignette price is in line with that.
Follow a bit their politics a bit and their domestic affairs and you will quickly note how unusual that population and this country is. Best place overall for me to live and raise my kids, thats for sure.
If business can deliver the same product with a smaller team, great!
And yes this has been happening for a while, even if not everywhere.
In enterprise consulting, projects that would require a team of 20 devs on average, now have about 5.
Moving away from on-prem, managing own cloud infra to managed containers, to serverless, SaaS and iPaaS ready made products, and offshoring naturally.
All contributed to ever decreasing team sizes.
Now AI based tooling is added to that cocktail, reducing even further the team sizes.
The only folks doing well in the end, are the employees of AI companies, without moral issues contributing to the industry downfall, because the CEO themselves aren't the ones coding and pirating human culture.
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