[typewithrhythm]

You hire discount engineers when you want to move to a maintenance and value extraction stage, something widespread in the industry at the moment due to changes is startup incentives and interest rates making entrenched players feel more safe.

It's not about "global equilibrium", because that misses completely that hiring a very expensive westener still has positive roi, but only if you are attempting to innovate.

[conductr]

It’s a larger shift from growth to mature business stages. All the growth of past couple decades is now maintenance

[johnnyanmac]

Is the shift because there's nothing to innovate, or because of economic headwinds? That's the real question to ask.

Projects are being cancelled left and right and teams dissolved, so this tells me that the former point is shakey. Something tells me that we'll have a tiny boom sometime after the AI bubble pops and suddenly innovation is "free" again. Or because smaller startups can actually get funded without needed to throw AI somewhere in their pitch deck.

[conductr]

There’s not a lot of actual innovation in software. Hasn’t been in quite some time. Any project a lot of these companies invest in has to be tied to a revenue stream or it doesn’t get funded. I think it’s a wholesale realization that they’ve been throwing money away at projects with no revenue and they’re shaping up/maturing as a company being smarter about what projects they invest in. I’m sure it has to do with tax code changes and such that initiated the bigger rethink. But it’s also just not a lot of big new foundational innovation taking place.

I’m not so optimistic. But glad some people are!

[pixl97]

No need to innovate when you can instead spend your budget on lobbying to get laws past to allow you to rentseek.