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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

If there are productivity gains of 30% per engineer, doesn't it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive?

This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I'm starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore

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Soon there's going to be a fuckload of money in pretending to clean up AI generated code while secretly deleting it and starting again.

>doesn't it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive?

Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.

As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself

I don’t find the claim of 30 percent improvement plausible, but it actually does track to me that you might pause hiring for a time if your employees were suddenly more productive in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.

> in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.

Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.

In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.

In my experience, while there are some things in the backlogs that a developer can basically pick up and run with, others require input from other roles to actually address or implement properly. And then once developed, you need to test, document, and localize a feature. (Realistically, you probably want to market it as well.) Depending on your design and support model, your customer service teams may need to help organizations implement the feature effectively or may need to be trained on how to answer customer questions about that feature.

What are you referring to as "this field"?

Software engineering, or at least the Silicon Valley style tech sector

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