This was in my head. I just wanted to write it.
So many layoffs. Engineers and engineering adjacent roles being rm -rf’d faster than you could imagine it could happen. Square, 4000, LinkedIn 600, Cloudflare 1000 and yesterday Facebook did 8000. Sympathies to anyone affected, it sucks. These are big numbers in the sense of companies but tiny numbers in the context of the global workforce. But where do they all go?
Humans
Some no doubt will be re-hired. Some may change industries, but the majority will likely remain in roles related to software. If you have to keep the lights on and put food on the table, that’s what you do – you crack on. But where to crack on? I’ll get to that, but lets go back up a level to the companies doing the “resizing”.
Borganisms
I don’t think for one second companies are done getting rid of people. Why would they? “we must squeeze every ounce out of the workforce” proclaims every board meeting. Harsh sure, but business is business. Dismantling that one is a topic for another day, but stay with me. Sure some will re-hire some engineers back, but I think the days of global software brands are here. Google, Shopify, Amazon, Xero and some smaller ones like Remote are all versed in the art of acquisition and it always made sense. By up the talent / IP in a given space and make it yours. But then there’s the issue of the messy humans and their pesky salary. Oh no.
CI/CD of the future
There’s a problem in the slopiverse. Too much god damn code is being written and we cannot review it. At least that’s the complaint. Personally think you either trust the code that AI writes, or you don’t. Before you jump down my throat this is not a carté blanché to send it out into production without any quality control. But I think the days of a meat with title being the ultimate adjudicator are over.
I think for some languages we’re now at the point where CI pipelines are now sophisticated enough to be able to get you a similar result to what senior/staff review gets you. Linting, formatting, unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, static analysis, package auditing, vulnerability scanning - these are all things you can wire into CI before it does it’s CD.
There will be some industries in which this unacceptable. But for most my money is investing in the CI pipelines to make sure there as effective as they can be. After all if you do that, you get a scale that could match the firehose of slop.
Factories
Imagine a factory.
This factory doesn’t produce shoes, food or hardware. It produces software. To a spec. There’s no large warehouse. There’s no office. Just a team of five people remotely working for their co-operatively owned software factory.
Tech Brands
Now imagine a future where large software companies are nothing more than data centres and products. They stopped writing software and don’t have engineers on staff anymore than nike has cobblers or seamstresses on staff. Like Nike, this big tech company is basically a brand. It buys in all of their code.
Specs are issued, vendors are selected and code is produced. It is shipped from the factory to the vendor in a container and ingested into the tech brands infrastructure through the most heavy duty security and feature analysis the world has seem. It makes Mythos look like a JavaScript version of Eliza.
The ingestion approves the image, the containers are loaded and moved into production.
Software factories. I’m 100% sure that I don’t know how I feel about this. Some of it feels awesome, some of it feels terrifying.