I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.

So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.

It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.

I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.

▲

janalsncm 5 days ago | parent [-]

> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient

I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.

Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.

	▲	jdiff 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.