[arexxbifs]

1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."

2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."

[pixl97]

That slide rule got replaced by software at least two decades ago and probably far more. The engineering staff got quartered and the sales staff tripled, QA was fired, and stock buybacks are the name of the game.

[jpfromlondon]

>The engineering staff got quartered and the sales staff tripled, QA was fired

A tale as old as time.