Comment by dcchambers

There's no doubt big tech is/was bloated. It was (relatively) cheap to stack and retain talent just so your competition couldn't get them. There was also an era where VPs and directors had direct incentives to grow their orgs as large as possible.

The opportunity cost is higher now (companies are actually spending money on capex), and changes in productivity due to AI mean that simply hoarding talented developers isn't as useful any more. Before, you could keep people "busy" doing things that didn't really produce anything useful, and still find ways to justify it. VPs and directors are now being rewarded for "doing more with less" - not just shipping the largest organization.

I think overall SWE numbers will continue to slowly climb, but I think we're going to see more big tech unwind bloated staff numbers.