I really don't care generally if a business feels the need to hype things like this - but these kinds of announcements have downstream effects on salaries and job availability far outside a company like this. Other management/C-suites are gonna hear "we replaced all our engineers with AI!" and similarly slow down hiring/etc. This is already being seen throughout the industry, I am aware, but such a visible player making an announcement like this, while it almost certainly is just marketing, drives me a little crazy because it indirectly affects a lot of people.
If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
> If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
Who cares when they'll just float away on a golden parachute to the next company that will overpay them to make terrible decisions. Executives will happily jump at any excuse to lower wages, cut jobs, and pocket the money they saved while raising their prices. Making it harder for people to find work because of layoffs and hiring freezes just means that if AI under-delivers (and it always does), they can just hire on a bunch of new people later at lower wages thanks to the larger pool of people looking for work.
Most likely the software engineer would be aggressively prosecuted and harshly sentenced (assuming they survive long enough to see a courtroom) while nothing substantial would improve for any of the other software engineers.
> Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually.
Sure, but I don't care about these companies - I care about my career and the opportunities available to me in the next 1-5 years. If these opportunities are tainted by false claims about AI capabilities - that is a huge problem to me. It is irrelevant to me whether the company eventually suffers for it, because that doesn't reimburse my "damages" (if they exist).
I agree with you though, and to be clear I absolutely do not believe this is anything but marketing hype - If anyone was actually doing what they claimed we'd be seeing evidence of it. I have yet, to this day, to see any evidence of such claims. If you say "30% productivity" without saying how you measured that and the methods you used, I can instantly call BS and rest easy at night. Lots of similar claims seem the same way.
"outstanding claims require outstanding evidence" or something like that.
It is the general insecurity about new tech although I haven't seen a single job being replaced by AI yet. And I also think the market for SWE is still very good though. And the only ones that use AI on a large scale for that matter.
Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.
I think there's a case to be made that the AI boom will require more engineers in the short term, not less. Think of the myriad of features AI capabilities open for any product, not to mention a CRM platform like salesforce.
As for the time it saves-Sure, AI saves plenty of time, but in a big company most of the time isn't spent on coding. It's spent on collaboration, code reviews, meetings, debugging, looking at production logs, using internal tools, etc.
