I think the misconception is that there's a finite amount of stuff to do. Every place i've worked at there's been a near infinite backlog. Lots of stuff that wo

I think the misconception is that there's a finite amount of stuff to do. Every place i've worked at there's been a near infinite backlog. Lots of stuff that would be done if they could. It's always been a constraint on the number of people hired (budget and availability). I don't see engineers not being part of the process for many years, even if most of the work is done for them. For most companies, if they had their engineers suddenly become 10x more productive, they'd want them to do 10x as much, not scale down to 10% of the staff. Not to say some companies wouldn't.