Thread

With all the layoffs in tech I sometimes hear people say „how can they lay off so many people with no business impact? Clearly they have all been slacking!“ What people don‘t get is that devs aren‘t required to keep the business running. They build it.

Software companies are like factories. The software engineers aren‘t factory workers, they build, modify and improve the factory to optimize it, adapt it, and make new kinds of services and features possible.

So why do you keep all those people in your payroll once the factory is up and running? Why don‘t you contract out the construction part?

Three reasons: Software is still much newer than factory construction and much less standardized, so you need to keep a specialized team that knows your factory around.

Also, software companies are constantly changing, growing, trying out new stuff, so there is always things to do.

Maybe the most important part: as we‘ve all painfully realized over and over again, it is very hard to build software according to a spec. You need to iterate and be agile to figure out what it really is that you need to build, and that‘s not something you can outsource easily.