Comment by aleph_minus_one

> But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.

> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.

Software engineers also need

- specialized machinery (at least when they have to upload to some computation cluster or cloud), think for example of the costs for GPU/TPU clusters for AIs at the moment

- tooling: depending on the sector, the license costs for the sector-specific business software can be similar as expensive as specialized machinery

- mental capacity (instead of physical capacity)