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Comment by adam_arthur | Hacker News Reader

Yup, a single dev can build out a massive business via severless cloud components in what used to take a large army of engineers.

It just so happens job growth has historically exceeded efficiency gains. The equilibrium point seems close from my perspective, especially if there’s a shock of recession to hammer tech employment

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The real value add of software engineering hasn't been code for awhile, it's figuring out what code needs to be written and which architecture/services are the most efficient to implement it.

Yes, same as the value of a plumber, electrician or architect. Difference there is there isn't a supply/demand imbalance of labor in those jobs. And there soon won't be one in engineering either

Have you tried to call an electrician or plumber recently? Assuming you can even get one on the phone, they can basically name their price for any job.

Especially in Silicon Valley.

That’s a very hard prediction to make. The most expensive part of software is maintenance and it’s not decreasing over time.

Considering many F500 have old crusty mainframes deep in the bowels of their core operations… who wants to deal with that stuff. The stories I could tell from doing security consulting engagements and peering into these abysses. HN is a bubble about this stuff and loses perspective some of the time. The cool and sexy engineering might end up funneling into a harder to reach place, but meat and potatoes software maintenance and engineering that keeps big business going is not going anywhere. The things and languages we are inventing now will take decades to penetrate and replace the things deep in big business right now. Never mind the horror that is operations software like SAP.

Of course it's decreasing. The amount of people required to maintain an application of a given size continues to drop significantly over time.

Something like Docusign, once built out, could be maintained by a handful of people using serverless components. Same thing with Twitter and pretty much every other application.

Interestingly, as a side effect of this, the marginal gains on the most skilled engineers continues to increase.

For certain classes of work it is very difficult to hire even at the top of the market. There are positions my company would happily pay a million/yr to fill and simply cannot find anyone who meets the requirements.

Yes, so the median wage declines, and the wage of the most productive increases. You'll have 20% or fewer of engineers doing most of the work.

The amount of impact an individual can have has never been higher

What sort of positions out of curiosity?

It's hard to list all of the sorts because sometimes the needs are quite nebulous. Sometimes it's someone who's a great engineer who's just... really great at certain kinds of growth hacking, whatever that entails. These are more "you know it when you see" opportunities. Engineering leadership can be sort of similar. The kind of person who can "make things happen". More technical roles are often easier to describe. A few concrete examples:

Someone who got their PhD researching databases who is also a very experienced software engineer.

A senior software engineer who's worked for a few years in the finance world, and understands some of the more advanced math like stochastic calculus.

Someone with experience helping hypergrowth mode startups whose main DB is MySql to adopt Vitess.

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