> Your assumption is there is a fixed amount of engineering work to do so you need to hire fewer programmers, which is untrue. Every organization I worked at could have invested a lot more in engineering, be-it infrastructure, analytics, automation, etc.
True. Problem is investment is a long-term action (cost now, for gains later). Literally every company can benefit from investment. The key question is whether how valuable are the gains over a given time period relatively to the cost you are incurring between now and the moment the gains are actualised.
LLMs wouldn't have helped Meta/Microsoft/Google lay off less people in the last 2 years. In fact, you could argue that they would have helped lay off MORE people as with LLMs you need less people to run the company. Do you think Zuckerberg would have INCREASED expenses (that's what productivity investments are) when their stock was in freefall?
Companies can't afford to spend indefinite amounts of money at any time. If your value has been going down or is going down, increasing your current expenses will get you fired. Big problems now, require solutions now. The vast majority of the tech companies in the world chose to apply a solution now.
Maybe you are right, but a look at the tech world in the last 3 years should be telling you that your decision would have been deeply popular with the people that hold the moneybags. And at the end of the day, those are the people you don't want to anger no matter how smart you believe yourself to be.