I don't get why making engineers more productive would decrease their salaries. It should be the reverse.
You could argue that it makes the bar lower to be productive so the candidate pool is much greater, but you're arguing the opposite, increasing the barrier to entry.
I'm open to arguments either way and I'm undecided, but you have to have a coherent economic model.
But they're more productive. Your assumption is there is a fixed amount of engineering work to do so you need to hire fewer programmers, which is untrue. Every organization I worked at could have invested a lot more in engineering, be-it infrastructure, analytics, automation, etc.
Even if there were a fixed amount of work to do and we're already near that max amount, salaries still wouldn't necessarily go down. Again, they're more productive. Farming used to be 90% of the workforce in the US in the early 1900s. Now farmers are more productive and they're only 2% of the workforce. Do these farmers today earn a lower salary adjusted for inflation than 100 years ago? Of course not, because they're much more productive now with tools.
Generally wages track productivity. The more productive, the higher the wage.
Another example is bank tellers. With the advent of the ATM, somehow bank teller salaries didn't drop in real terms.
Show me an example of where this played out. Someone was made much more productive through technology and their salary dropped considerably
> Your assumption is there is a fixed amount of engineering work to do so you need to hire fewer programmers, which is untrue. Every organization I worked at could have invested a lot more in engineering, be-it infrastructure, analytics, automation, etc.
True. Problem is investment is a long-term action (cost now, for gains later). Literally every company can benefit from investment. The key question is whether how valuable are the gains over a given time period relatively to the cost you are incurring between now and the moment the gains are actualised.
LLMs wouldn't have helped Meta/Microsoft/Google lay off less people in the last 2 years. In fact, you could argue that they would have helped lay off MORE people as with LLMs you need less people to run the company. Do you think Zuckerberg would have INCREASED expenses (that's what productivity investments are) when their stock was in freefall?
Companies can't afford to spend indefinite amounts of money at any time. If your value has been going down or is going down, increasing your current expenses will get you fired. Big problems now, require solutions now. The vast majority of the tech companies in the world chose to apply a solution now.
Maybe you are right, but a look at the tech world in the last 3 years should be telling you that your decision would have been deeply popular with the people that hold the moneybags. And at the end of the day, those are the people you don't want to anger no matter how smart you believe yourself to be.
In the real world experiment we're living through you're being proven wrong. Tech companies have been laying off engineers continuously for several years now and wages are down.
Layoffs started before the rise in llms and all the tooling around coding using llms. They were never used as a justification. What happened was musk bought Twitter, cut 80% headcount and it was still up which showed you can be leaner and other tech ceos took note. That and the stock crashed as we were post COVID bubble.
You could argue that it makes the bar lower to be productive so the candidate pool is much greater, but you're arguing the opposite, increasing the barrier to entry.
I'm open to arguments either way and I'm undecided, but you have to have a coherent economic model.