I don’t know if I’d agree with the claim that 50% can be cut… but there is certainly bloat and it could be time to trim the fat. This would be very good news for the industry since all those engineers will start new things and build new companies.
That said, I think the salaries might stagnate. End of 2021 had everyone starting a new job and competing offers. It may not last so the negotiations won’t be as lucrative. Beyond that, tech salaries are high because the profit per person is high and that won’t change much, especially if companies trim excess employees.
I read somewhere a while ago (can’t find it) that Uber once discovered they had multiple teams all making an internal map gui, just siloed into different orgs so there was no visibility. While it’s a crazy example and probably fake, it’s not hard to imagine an org like google or Amazon where there are 100k employees having some level of duplicated efforts.
With office politics, some architectural decisions get made because everyone wants their team to touch important things. I was part of a team that owned a critical request flow and when they were adding new features it was decided that this API should be the entry point for those new features (10% increase in traffic estimated). So it went from a crud app (stateless app with database) to an API ingress with a (custom written) event queue linked to a queue processor (by AWS sqs) linked to a service that was responsible for handing the request off to one of several crud apps (except no new ones were written). Now 4 teams had a portion of the flow under their control. Was there a reason for this architecture? Yes. Would it have happened if the org didnt balloon from 7 engineers to 50? Probably not. Would customers have noticed? Yes, the API would have been faster and more reliable.
Beyond that, it’s well documented that tech people like shiny new toys. I interviewed at DoorDash for a pretty visible product team. They said they were hiring to do a complete rewrite of their product switching to and that it was their main deliverable for 2022. The team I was leaving during said interview was allocating 50% of headcount to rewrite the tech stack from binary on VMs to “AWS native” technology. No new features. If the team was told to cut some headcount or was denied headcount to grow, that’s be the first project axed because it doesn’t save money or help the customer. Meanwhile, my new team has 1/3 the people for a literal 10-100x traffic product with way more customer visibly. If you spent the last few years on this team, you’d think software engineering was lean and efficient. On my last one you’d say it’s bloated and full of busywork.