In its current stage, the tech industry is dealing with a wave of major layoffs, a trend influenced by economic conditions, overvaluations, AI, and the pursuit of profitability. In this context, it's essential to understand how businesses can navigate reductions in their engineering workforce and the rationale behind them initially employing large armies of software engineers.
To shed light on these questions, we turn to Anatoly Volkhover, a distinguished author of "Become an Awesome Software Architect" and the visionary behind the low-code startup Rishon, whose profound understanding of the field is widely respected.
"Having been in the industry for the past 30 years, and worked on dozens of large projects, I can say with certainty that today's software architectures are extremely complex," Anatoly explains. "The end users expect top performance, high reliability, and all sorts of bells and whistles like shiny mobile apps, rich web experiences, cross-platform availability, and more. To satisfy the demand, we must use a cobweb of programming languages, frameworks, integrations, and distributed design patterns, even for very basic projects. The reality of today's development tools is that the complexity is not contained, and engineers must handle it directly. This calls for many highly specialized skill sets, hence the need for a large number of engineers."
"Larger teams require more collaboration, management, and processes to keep everything in check. More often than not, running a large engineering workforce results in substantial inefficiencies and humongous budgets. An average developer spends less than an hour of their day coding. This is the only contribution they make to creating new software. Another hour goes into reviewing their teammates' work, and the remainder of the day is spent on meetings and emails. This is why software engineering is so expensive that most businesses are completely priced out of developing custom solutions."
But does it really have to be that way?
"The realization of this problem brought many innovations over the past decade, from low and no-code tools to the recent attempts to leverage generative AI for writing code," Anatoly says. "Today, we see more and more companies that create and operate very demanding products with a tiny but very efficient engineering team. For instance, Telegram has only 30 engineers despite having nearly a billion users."
In Anatoly's opinion, the recent advances in technology and engineering processes gave the Big Tech companies plenty of room to trim down their engineering workforce without threatening their core product offerings. We could think of Twitter/X, cutting down 80% of its engineering team in charge of trust and safety.
However, this doesn't indicate a waning demand for software engineering. Quite the opposite: custom software solutions help businesses stay competitive and significantly improve their margins. Until recently, most companies could not afford to develop their own software. Things are changing rapidly with modern low/no-code technologies and AI. New technologies shield engineers from the underlying complexities, allowing lean teams or even solo developers to build and deploy competitive business solutions.
For Anatoly, the main driving forces behind his innovations were time and cost.
"I always wanted to empower engineers with an ability to take individually on any large tech company, launch fantastic new products, and do so in weeks—not years—on a shoestring budget. This means substantially outperforming the current generation of development tools and methodologies. I've designed, tested, and refined my methods over the years and many projects. Once I proved my methods worked, I published the book, 'Become an Awesome Software Architect.' The final step was to package all the knowledge in a tool and make it accessible to everyone. This is how Rishon was born."
Rishon, Anatoly's brainchild, is a stealth startup with a mission to supercharge the efficiency of business software development. The company develops an AI-enabled low-code tool that transforms functional specifications into fully operational enterprise software, eliminating the need for traditional or visual programming.
The alpha release of Rishon's technology shows 300x improvement over traditional development methods. This means a single engineer can launch a platform like Uber into production within weeks, unlike the typical team of 25 working for over a year. And they will improve further by the time the Rishon platform ships in early 2025.
Anatoly says, "I am saddened to see so many people lose their jobs. I hope that Rishon technology enables many of them to become solopreneurs, regain their financial freedom, and help all businesses needing custom solutions. I can't wait to see all the beautiful things these folks create."
