Raw LLM Responses

> take the opposite opinion. TBH I think many big tech companies were over hiring engineers for years. Even without AI, the job was getting easier due to better tooling and specialization of SaaSes. This is pretty objectively true, but I don't think automation ever had much to do with it. The reality is that programming is about automation, and we have improved that automation, year over year, since programming was first invented. We are orders of magnitude more productive in every measurable sense, and yet that has never led to a decrease in demand for developers. On the contrary, much like [Jevons Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), when resources get cheaper (in this case, developer productivity), corporations actually purchase *more* of it. There are more developers today *because* we're more productive, not in spite of it. As for the specifics of the overhiring in 2020 and the rapid firing in 2023, I think that's best explained by covid and the rapid upward transfer of wealth. The wealthy had so much more money as a result of the pandemic that they had to invest it elsewhere, which is why stocks, real estate, and basically every other asset rapidly inflated in value. In the tech industry, that manifested by treating employees as assets. They got in a bidding war over talent, expecting to have enough money to fund several new projects. But as salaries rose as a result, they decided it wasn't worth the investment.