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Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are (justifiably) afraid of getting laid off, which results in decisions that are sub-optimal or even illogical. Fourthly, people tend to only spend a few years at companies before moving on (for a pay-increase), which disincentivizes companies to hire more, and it incentivizes companies/management (and even employees) to engage in a kind of performative conformity designed to signal replace-ability (this effectively means that many companies are going to choose to do whatever everyone else is doing, instead of the unusual thing that will likely work better -- think of it as cargo-cult entrepreneurship/management/engineering). Fifthly, those engineers that leave take with them the knowledge and technology that they built up at a different employer and launder[1] it to their next employer. Sixthly, larger teams tend to produce more code per feature, and tend not to abstract/compress aggressively (which requires actually having a holistic understanding of the product), which means that team-sizes are likely to keep growing until the company's revenues stop growing. Put differently, enshittification and sloppification naturally emerge from the dynamics of how the majority of the industry works, and LLMs have simply automated it[2]. The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things. [1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020). [2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder). [3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs. |
I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.