I foresee the need for engineers to be really "wavy".

I have personally never been busier or more productive. It's like all the "work" of my work has disappeared. There are no more blockers and I can just run free and get as much done as I want and the only thing slowing me down is Jira.

The real downturn is going to be the SaaS apocalypse. In the next year or two there will be a reckoning where all these expensive low-code/no-code middleware applications suddenly don't make sense.

So I think it will be less about the ranks of engineers being thinned out unilaterally, and more about large swathes of products being obsolete.

▲

ed_elliott_asc 2 days ago | parent [-]

Which SaaS companies/products do you think are at risk?

▲

tossandthrow 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We are already in the works of removing 2: backoffice software that we moved to an in house react app and a library that has a license fee.

None of these are really because of cost. But more because we can get a superior product by doing so.

▲

rwmj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

None of them because those who think SaaS companies are just a bunch of bad code that is going to be quickly rewritten have no clue what they're talking about. No sane company is going to vibecode a replacement for Salesforce, because then they have a half-assed, buggy, broken pile of code they have to maintain, instead of outsourcing that problem along with legal, compliance and support to someone else.

It's honestly tiresome to keep having to debunk this with people who have no clue at all how large companies operate.

▲

lbreakjai 2 days ago | parent [-]

Nobody's going to vibecode an internal salesforce. On the other hand, the barrier for ex-salesforce engineers to take their knowledge and build a competitor with the 20% of the features that represent 80% of the usage is dramatically lower.

I think the SaaS landscape will look vastly different in five years.

▲

rwmj 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your engineering focus is exactly the problem! Salesforce as software is a piece of crap, no one is arguing that. But companies continue to buy it because (a) it's familiar to all their sales & marketing people, (b) SFDC is all set up to be able to sell into other large companies (not a trivial task), (c) it already does all the legal, regulatory and compliance stuff, worldwide, which is hugely complex and boring to replicate and needs people on the ground in multiple countries to achieve. Coding is not the problem here.

	▲	ygrr 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Many here don’t really get what a software firm is, do they? These people are deluded and have never operated a business enterprise themselves.

▲

nunez a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i don't know about this. the disadvantages to this strategy are non-trivial on both ends of the AI debate.

if the cost of AI doesn't decrease, between skill atrophy and personnel shortages, this will create massive technical liabilities that companies will need to pay incredible amounts (to contractors, or, likely, to SaaS incumbents) to fix.

if the cost of AI does decrease, then every function those companies AI-code themselves is basically horse trading those SaaS companies with big AI.

(open weights models are improving, but most of the SOTA open-source models are from Chinese labs, the huge companies that will make a dent in SaaS revenue are restricted from using them, and the American labs have a profit motive to prevent their open-weight models from reaching parity with their closed-weight models.)

▲

Synthetic7346 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

But those already exist! There are a lot of Salesforce competitors that have much better execution. Yet salespeople absolutely demand Salesforce, and unless that changes I can say with absolute certainty no vibe coded clone from ex-Salesforce engineers is going to dent CRM