I agree. "Keeping them busy" also raises an uncomfortable question: if Uber and other valuable Unicorns can be executed 99.999% with 25% of the engineers they h

I agree. "Keeping them busy" also raises an uncomfortable question: if Uber and other valuable Unicorns can be executed 99.999% with 25% of the engineers they hire, do they need the next 75% of engineers? Even considering crunch-time and potential diversification/expansion, full-time employment of non-critical engineers is obviously inefficient. And, as Uber proved, politically toxic and consequently harmful to the productivity of the business. More pressing is the existential tension underlying this quandary. That our economy will generally and increasingly forgo the skilled and unskilled labor provided by our society. Framed concretely: one day, we may define a "10x engineer" as an engineer who can send ten other engineers to the soup kitchen. I'm still looking for a well-thought-out solution.