All of the above points align with our organization’s experience. But there is one more thing happening as well: we have more people in more roles able to create software solutions for issues that used to be brute forced via physical processes. (We are a small manufacturing business.) While these aren’t big giant enterprise projects that require deep swe experience, they are simple software tools that are improving process and productivity everywhere. It is pretty amazing what happens when your head of shipping can build a bespoke tool to solve a problem that previously they dealt with through burning through a lot of labor hours.

I would be really interested in the details of these kind of tools that are improving processes and productivity.

Are they reasonably documented/audited/put into any sort of version control like a lot of internal tooling? Or are they the kind of the thing that gets whacked together on the fly in a "move spreadsheet data from A to B", "I want a list of people's schedules with custom highlighting" kind of things.

Not doubting your productivity increase, I'm just curious how people quantify that when they say it.

One of our BAs created a site that tests the effectiveness of copy / layout adjustments. I don't even know exactly what that's called but he's able to do statistical analysis much faster on what works and what doesn't. It's really cool to watch him thrive and I feel like some of the thinkers that were not devs are going to find themselves to be one but in their specific domain in a few years

Yes. In the same way that spreadsheets are the dev tools for non-devs, LLMs could step into that role, but with much more powerful end result. With the caveat that in the same way you can create a powerful foot-gun with a spreadsheet you can probably create a foot-cannon with an LLM.

yeah the Coinbase CEO gleefully pointed that out as well and now the market thinks they are totally incompetent every time some UX quirk is found

looks like orgs have to have engineers on for optics. like having a legal staff with no lawyers, or a cybersecurity staff with no IT or certified people. Software has famously not needed state licenses or industry certification, but maybe thats a direction to consider to give utility to company optics.