[koonsolo]

There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work.

Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work.

For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!

[evenhash]

There will always be more work that could be done, certainly.

What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it.

In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.

[koonsolo]

If your competitor can deliver more features faster and with higher quality, I don't think it's them that will end up bankrupt.

[suls]

Great way of putting this. I certainly feel like this in smaller companies where each action (or inaction) has a direct consequence on the profitability.

[insane_dreamer]

> For software projects, there is always more work to do.

sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question

[koonsolo]

Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work?

What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?

[pjmlp]

Nope, in many countries software developers are office workers like everyone else, there is no salary tied to lines of code.