Software will eat software in a remote-first world
A lot of people in the discussion disagree with the article&#x27;s first point about no-code&#x2F;less-code. While I do think the argument is a little fatalistic, the scoffing at the idea in the face of him bringing up evidence such as AWS and other IaaS&#x2F;PaaS reducing the number of in-house server engineers that companies need, and how the proliferation of open-source libraries&#x2F;frameworks has made creating software easier than ever, reminds me of economists pooh-poohing the notion that modern forms of automation will lead to unprecedented levels of job loss just because previous waves of automation didn&#x27;t. Even in the face of self-driving cars and automated receptionist&#x2F;call support agents that James Watt couldn&#x27;t even dream of.<p>But whether no-code&#x2F;less-code is inevitable, I think his first argument can still be substantiated from a different approach, at least in the near future: we&#x27;re coming at the end of a tech bubble, the money will start receding, and organizations have already been realizing they don&#x27;t need so many coders (and other staff) after all. Did Uber really need to build their own in-house version of Slack? Did Airbnb really need to pour so many resources towards adopting, even contributing heavily, to React Native, only to do an about-face and have to rewrite their mobile apps in their native platform? Did either company, like so many gig&#x2F;sharing companies during this bubble, have to invest so much in hyper-growth and expanding to so many markets before they were ready? Did so many of these companies have to fall prey to Not Invented Here syndrome and waste so much time in engineering boondoggles?<p>To some extent, yes, it&#x27;s what&#x27;s the investors wanted, or what corporate leadership thought would make the investors happy. And so this boom has led to massive hiring on a lot of busywork that doesn&#x27;t actually have tangible economic benefit to these organizations, and may have even led to worse outcomes due to unsustainable or reckless behavior.<p>Going back to the article, whether the first point can be explained by inevitable no-code&#x2F;low-code eating the world, or by the fact that a lot of software generated were due to the frenzy of a bubble, it still leads to the same point:<p>&gt; <i>Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very true.</i><p>And the article&#x27;s subsequent conclusion about how widespread WFH will lead to cold calculated culling of a lot of unnecessary or redundant personnel, aided by the the emotional detachment of not having to see the faces of the people to be let go, still follows.