They can focus on other things that are more impactful in the business rather than just slinging code all day, they can actually look at design and the product!
Maximum headcount for engineers is around 7, no more than that now. I used to have 20, but with AI we don't need that many for our size.
If I survived having 65% of my colleagues laid off you'd better believe I wouldn't complain in public.
I'd also be looking for a new job that values the skills I've spent a decade building.
I wonder if the remaining engineers' salary increased by the salary of the laid off coworkers'
Someone barking orders at you to generate code because they are too stupid to be able to read it is not very fun.
These people hire developers because their own brains are inferior, and now they think they can replace them because they don't want to share the wages with them.
Never does.
I don't see how you could think 7 engineers would love the workload of 20 engineers, extra tooling or not.
Have fun with the tech debt in a few years.
Management may see a churn of a few years as acceptable. If management makes 1$M in that time.. they wont care. "Once I get mine, I don't care"
Like my old CEO who moved out of state to avoid a massive tax bill, got his payout, became hands off, and let the company slide to be almost worthless.
Or at my current company there is no care for quality since we're just going to launch a new generation of product in 3 years. We're doing things here that will CAUSE a ground up rewrite. We're writing code to rely on undocumented features of the mcu that the vendor have said 'we cannot guarantee it will always behave this way' But our management cycles out every 3-4 years. Just enough time to kill the old, champion the new, get their bonus, and move on. Bonuses are handed out every January. Like clockwork there's between 3-7 directors and above who either get promoted or leave in February.
I don't see how any business person would see any value in engineering that extends past their tenure. They see value in launching/delivering/selling, and are rolling the dice that we're JUST able to not cause a nation wide outage or brick every device.
So AI is great... as long as I've 'gotten mine' before it explodes