I mean.. they're a big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning. Not to mention, you often need the engineers more than yo

I mean.. they're a big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning. Not to mention, you often need the engineers more than you, given how much time it takes them to ramp up, and how hard it is to find quality ones, so they get to demand high wages (often while not really doing that great of a job---looking at you, average college hire who's not aspiring to be any sort of leader or expert in their field). If you ran a company you'd want to replace them also. (None of that has anything to do with whether it's just for the world to operate this way. Personally I'd like to see all engineer wages go down and owner/shareholder returns go down and all that money go to lesser-paid roles or cheaper prices. But we lived in a version of capitalism that doesn't presently seem to present a way to do that...) Personally I think programming will be 10x as efficient in the not-so-distant future (25 years maybe), and that everyone vaguely understands this: that what we're doing today is in some sense a waste of effort. Similar to building a road or railroad with hundreds of manual laborers instead of a few big machines.