I'm sure the people that rode horses as their job loved to ride horses. Ah well.
“the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects 10% growth for software developers, QA analysts and testers from 2025 to 2035.”
“GitHub counted more than 180 million developers in its 2025 report, and more than 36 million of them had joined in the previous twelve months.”
Seems like a lot more humans are applying and expected to apply?
> "Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub—over 36 million in the past year. It’s our fastest absolute growth rate yet and 180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub."
> "Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute, merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month (+23% YoY), and pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY)—including a record of nearly 100 million in August alone."
and goes on a lot longer.
Maybe we get rid of engineers and have really good product managers. Maybe we get rid of product managers and have really good product engineers. But we don't get rid of humans. There is a reason no (successful) company ever said "we finished the app, now fire all the engineers and collect money forever."
Software is never finished, only abandoned as the world passes it by.
Never worked in the games industry, have you?
Less and less humans will be needed to support these businesses.
> There is a reason no (successful) company ever said "we finished the app, now fire all the engineers and collect money forever."
1) software is very easy to get duplicated and commoditized. So the margins get tighter and tighter and companies with "finished software" will have less and less money to be collected. Big companies need constant reinvention not because customers need improvements, but to keep their lines going up in the chart.
Remember Skype before being bought by Microsoft? It was as close as I can imagine from being "finished". It could be run forever with a skeleton crew and they could be collecting a few millions of dollars forever for their service. Do you think that MS paid 7 BILLION USD because of the "finished" software?
Software engineers are not required to copy files around. They are hired to figure out what is the best way to deliver the features envisioned by product managers, and how to keep things working.
> So the margins get tighter and tighter and companies with "finished software" will have less and less money to be collected.
There is no such thing as finished software. At best you decide to stop maintaining it.
I've worked at a FANG where I had the opportunity to personally witness a few teams being summarily fired after they delivered the project.
In one case they had their team manager motivate them with pep talks that if they did a fantastic job delivering the project then higher ups could be swayed to preserve their roles. So they delivered ahead of schedule, only to be fired ahead of schedule too.
How cool are you with the odds of your entire family surviving the next 100 years standing at about 10%?
My entire family (for my natural interpretation of that expression) is aged over 20 so I don't expect any of them to survive the next 100 years.
I tend to support VHEMT anyway!