[jonas21]

I don't really see how the example of a product team going from 12 people to 2 supports the case that the world needs fewer workers.

Most products go through a cycle where you need a lot of people to develop them at first, then they stabilize and require fewer people, and the other people move on to different products.

You can't just look at one product or team in isolation -- as long as there are new products to be built, there will be a need for those workers.

[geodel]

I agree anecdote is not sufficient. I wanted to extend my experience as national or worldwide trend, may be that is not the case. But when I read increasingly frequent layoffs at all major IT vendors (IBM/HP/Oracle/Capgemini/Tata/Infosys/Cognizant and many more ) I tend to think it is general trend.

New products will be built always but with multilayered designs, more and more functionality is going in libraries/frameworks in lower layers. So a new product started today will not need as many developers. Again I am not arguing about the general quality of such product but new developments are using fewer developers than past.

[pm90]

So my view of the layoffs at the big "IT Vendors" is simply that the tasks which they originally hired workers for became increasingly automated or moved to systems that were less labor intensive.

A lot of the workers in India, for one example, worked on things you would hardly call programming. e.g. creating charts from data, manually moving data from db to db etc. These kinds of tasks should have (IMO) been automated in the first place, and should not require full time employees to handle them. As the automation become more mature, stable and well adopted, the bigger vendors start using them and don't require fleets of humans to manage them anymore. For a concrete example, I think ansible (and related tools) probably "destroyed" thousands of jobs as you didn't need to manage bash scripts manually etc.

There is another fleet of people who are hired simply for maintaining, developing on legacy systems, people you wouldn't find in the US. e.g. COBOL programmers.