Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

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I think it depends the 'how good, how fast' curve of automation

If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

If on the other hand we develop tons of cool hands-on automation technologies that deliver lots of value but require programmer-like people to run them, that may sustain the labor demand for a while

there's an argument gap between 'AI is taking developer jobs unless you can do ML' and 'basic app development, even when non-fancy, is like pulling teeth and requires experts if you don't want to deliver crap that fails all the time'

I think we're still living in the 'basics are hard and require experts' world for 18-36 months and then the tooling fills in and starts to make magic easy

Considering most of their revenue still comes fom one area I would imagine they could shed a substantial portion of their workforce without any technical advances.

My guess is it's only a lack of direct competition that is stopping this.

> If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

Google has a lot more than this, FWIW.

what's the actual number? I tried Googling it, and the first few results are giving me numbers from 5+ years ago (around 20k)

I’ve generally heard that Google is about half to two-thirds engineers, and they have around 100,000 employees. I’m fairly sure they have the most among FAANG.

Yeah, I can't see CRUD app development providing top-tier salaries for more than 5-10 more years.

What CRUD app companies pay top tier salaries currently? They all pay much less than GAFAM from what I have read.

Most engineers at GAFAM (or whatever the trendy acronym is) are doing CRUD work.

I prefer FMAGA.. because of the ambiguity.

The rules and regulations are changing. More big companies need people to make more ADA compliant and GDPR compliant CRUD apps now, all these web apps will either be maintained or die, and another take it's place. So until some major patterns are agreed upon by software vendors/browsers/frameworks or whatever, I don't think it will change much.

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