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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE.

Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opportunity to trim down roles and they do not care.

This year's excuse is now anything that uses AI, GPTs or Agents and they will try to do it anyway. Companies such as Devin and Klarna are not hiding this fact.

There will just be less engineers and customer service roles in 2025.

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Some will. Some won't. The ones that cut engineering will be hurting by 2027, though, maybe 2026.

It's almost darwinian. The companies whose managers are less fit for running an organization that produces what matters will be less likely to survive.

Only dodgy dinosaur companies with shitty ancient crusty management see engineers as cost centers. Any actual modern tech company sees engineers as the engine that drives the entire business. This has been true for decades.

From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs, because they contribute to grow the valuation of the company assets.

The right thing to do economically (in capitalism) is to do more of the same, but faster. So if you as a software engineer or customer service rep can't do more of the same faster you will replaced by someone (or something) that alleggedly can.

> From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs

At Google? Perhaps. At most companies? No. At most places, software engineering is a pure cost center. The software itself may be an asset, but the engineers who are churning it out are not. That's part of the reason that it's almost always better to buy than build -- externalizing shared costs.

Just for an extreme example, I worked at a place that made us break down our time on new code vs. maintenance of existing code, because a big chunk of our time was accounted for literally as a cost, and could not be depreciated.

So what you're saying is that some of us should be gearing up to pull in ludicrous amounts of consultant money in 2026, when the chickens come home to roost, and the managers foolish enough to farm out software development to LLMs need to hire actual humans at rate to exorcize their demon-haunted computers?

Yeah that will be a lucrative niche if you have the stomach for it...

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