Raw LLM Responses

I take the opposite opinion. TBH I think many big tech companies were over hiring engineers for years. Even without AI, the job was getting easier due to better tooling and specialization of SaaSes. Ie a newer architecture takes significantly less manpower to maintain even at high scale compared to old architectures. I was a VP at a startup founded around 2013. Their first product took a team of 60 engineers to maintain. Our second product, built on a more modern stack, took 6 engineers and made as much revenue and processed more scale. This led to a limited refactor of the first product which removed the hardest to maintain parts, freeing up engineers to work on new things. I'm talking simple stuff - like using SQS, lambda functions, etc. Anyways I think companies are dialling in a new cost -> revenue ratio wrt to engineering resourcing. Twitter is one extreme (but not recommended) example of this, ie everything thought it would crash and burn and yeah, there were a few pains, but overall the service stayed up with a third of the engineers. Google/Meta have also done a ton of reorgs, and while some of those are layoffs, a lot of them is reshuffling people to new team and new bets because less people needed to work on each products. Anyways it's all first hand thoughts and super anecdotal. I just don't see why people would go back to hiring as much as they did with the salaries as they were. It was kind of silly and frankly most people I know in FAANG were coasting pretty hard.