We spend a lot of time debating whether AI is “smart” enough to replace us.

I think that’s the wrong target. AI doesn’t replace people. Incentives do.

Capital owners decides whether productivity gains mean:

– cutting the workforce to increase profitability

or

– keeping the workforce and scaling the business.

Throughout history, major productivity shifts also reduced working hours.

- 12-hour days became 8.

- 6-day weeks became 5 (at least in parts of the world).

Those changes weren’t automatic. They were negotiated.

If those decisions were left solely to capital owners, many of those quality-of-life improvements would likely never have happened.

I've always struggled to share my milestones because I generally tend to understate my own achievements and skills.

But 2025 was different because I managed to convert my struggles into achievements and I am proud of it.

I'm sharing this not to brag, but to show what is possible when you stay motivated.

Feel free to reach out, if you’re curious about the details. I can’t and won’t give you a financial advice, but I’m happy to share my non‑secrets(there are not secrets!) for the rest.

I will avoid getting into a “who understands economics better” debate.

But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.

By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.

Factory overhiring can happen easily by adding speculative 2nd and 3rd shifts. No need for extra equipment, tooling, or physical capacity.

Lines with specialty equipment and tooling can also often be sped up. That can allow for other jobs to be added to all the functions that support the processes involved before and after the specialty equipment.

New employees also often require training and some apprenticeship time, meaning they can get hired ahead of actual demand.

I am really not debating whether over hiring is possible in factories.

in tech cost of hiring is lower which makes headcount a much easier speculative bet and layoffs a much easier reset when the bet fails.

That $45,000 factory worker is often operating a $1.5 million piece of equipment with $10-50,000/hr of materials going through it.

It's an entirely different cost structure.

There exists greater issues in hiring for manufacturing when it is for new shifts. Master level technicians and foremen willing to work those hours can be exceptionally difficult to find, and everything flows out of these people. While similar issues likely exist relating to discovering talent for software development, I speculate that the factory will, in practice, have a harder time finding people (for new shifts).

My experience with seeing new shifts added is initially with only specific processes, and even with those it is with journeyman level technicians running a small crew to support relieving a bottleneck in production.

Alternatively, manufacturers can outsource until they have enough volume to add a shift, but across the economy the net is just transferring production from one facility to another.

> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie.

Alas, gone are the days when engineers too required specialized equipment like a desktop computer on the desk that you couldn't move with you. Every evening, you left it at office and went home to live a 100% home life. Alas, gone are those days.

I was a contractor for a FAANG. My immediate cubicle neighbor liked to work out on lunch break, and to hang his sweaty, smelly gym things on the framework of his desk to air dry when he returned. I would've KILLED for a laptop I could take to the complimentary office café so I could get something done without holding my nose. If I were a full employee, I could just ask for one. Alas, as a mere contractor I was something less than a person, so I had to remain tethered to my desktop per company policy.

I mean, if killing was an option, getting rid of the cubicle neighbor would have solved the problem as well.

Maybe for some. I've worked from home for 15 years and a huge thing that I've learned is that I have to have a hard physical boundary. My work laptop stays at my desk unless I'm on call and actively fighting a fire. When I want to use my desk for non-work things the work laptop gets put away.

Crunch time in those days sucked. I remember mandatory nights and weekends and the managers ordering in pizza for everyone.

> But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.

> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.

Software engineers also need

- specialized machinery (at least when they have to upload to some computation cluster or cloud), think for example of the costs for GPU/TPU clusters for AIs at the moment

- tooling: depending on the sector, the license costs for the sector-specific business software can be similar as expensive as specialized machinery

- mental capacity (instead of physical capacity)

> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie...

> That low marginal cost

Not true. That's how everything falls apart. Scaling software teams isn't simple. There's lots to account for. Do you just assume everyone commit to the same file and let it crash?

The more people, the more work is required to standardize, organize, document and fix gaps. You can say you're already at scale and things "should" be done but they never are. You hire a team into a specific area to find it was a giant hack supported by a part-timer and as you try to fix it the problems keep escalating.

What's the cost of a programmer-quality laptop, with two large monitors, plus licenses for all the software that they need? That's 2-3K.

Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker?

(And the tool cost for a factory worker can be zero if you're hiring for a second shift - they would use the same tools as the first shift, just at different times. In contrast, I don't think there are very many places that ask programmers to use the same laptop in shifts.)

>Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker?

It's probably lower. Apart from safety gear like helmets and gloves, everything else is most likely reused across shifts or shared across workers simultaneously (think industrial machines).

they even cut costs by leasing the computers...

I'd add that companies write off their equipment investment over a 3-5 year depreciation period. After that, when the laptops reach EOL, employees can often buy them through the company's EPP (employee purchase program) usually for just the fair market value, which might be a couple hundred € or sometimes even less.

So, eventually they recoup the equipment costs, wouldn't get surprised if they even make a profit out of it sometimes.

First thing they do, they write off VAT (20-23% of laptop price). Then at the EOL, they just set the EPP price to the higher market value. And return the cost.

VAT doesn't exist in the US (and sales tax, which we do have, is more like 5-10% of sale cost), so are you talking about something specific to tech companies in Germany or the UK or something?

Not that everything has to be about the US, but it's weird to make a claim about the tech market as a whole that doesn't apply to its biggest single region.

Yep, I've used the € sign for a reason, to make sure people won't get confused.

The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.

I also want to note, that EPP isn't the correct term here. For US, EPP would mean Manufacturer Employee Purchase Programs for New Products with a discount. Like, if you work for HP, you can purchase a product it manufactures at a discount price for your personal use.

The EU practice that I was mentioning is called IT Asset Disposition through employer to employee disposal program[0]. I don't believe big companies in the US get involved in employer to employee ITAD for lots of reasons. But in EU, it's a thing, much to my surprise.

[0]: https://www.mddp.pl/disposal-of-used-equipment-by-an-employe...

>Yep, I've used the € sign for a reason, to make sure people won't get confused.

>The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.

You know what, that's entirely fair. And I'll also note that American companies can claim depreciation to offset corporate income taxes, so there's some parity there, it's just s different mechanism.

Is that common? I've never worked at a corporation that had an EPP for EoL computer equipment. It always all went to a specialist recycling/refurbishing business.

I don't know about "common", but at one place, when they were retiring my machine, I asked if I could buy it, and they agreed. (Of course, for that to work, you have to be there long enough that they replace your machine...)

Throughout my career I’ve run into this approach a couple of times. All in all, it’s a fairly unusual practice—I was surprised myself.

The low marginal cost also means that the job market is easier for software engineers in times when expectations are optimistic.

This, and I would also assume it's easier to spot idle factory employees, where idle devs (especially remote ones) can be easier to miss.

And, (assumption again) the factory boss doesn't have an incentive to increase idle worker numbers, where a dev manager often benefits from being in charge of a larger number of hardly working people.

It is a lot easier for a software engineer to overcomplicate things.

All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries.

No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.

This only holds for companies that do not have to comply with some regulation or standard, e.g. ISO 27001, to do business. Especially infrastructure, banking, and defense tech have high compliance requirements that also, and sometimes esp. cover software development.

I generally agree with you, but if you look deeper, cars, buildings, and the underlying know-how didn’t appear in a day either.

Those were also iterative processes: first tires and mud houses, then horse carriages and brick houses, and eventually cars and buildings.

In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from engineering today. Working on core engineering functionality of a company is essentially the same kind of process.

The difference lies in whether you’re working on core functionality, or on some iterative experiment that nobody knows will succeed.

When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.

I'm talking about how a single product is produced, not about its evolution through centuries. Anyway, the point wasn't to compare specific details, it's just an analogy.

hey I am the writer of the post anecdotally, my last job was an insurance company I got laid off from there too :)

Sure, factories also overhire sometimes or shrink their businesses but not at the scale or frequency we see in tech.

I've never worked in tech, but I've worked at manufacturers of various different sizes and places in the manufacturing supply chain, including finished goods.

Manufacturers can't hire beyond the places in production that someone can stand and do something. There needs to be some kind of equipment or process for worker to contribute in some meaningful way, even if it is merely for a projection of increased production (e.g., hiring a second shift for a facility currently running one shift).

What I wonder is if in tech, the "equipment" is a computer that supports everything a developer needs. From there, new things can be added to the existing product.

Manufacturing equipment is generally substantially more expensive than a computer and supporting software, though not always. Might this contribute to the differences, especially for manufacturing that normally runs 24-hour shifts?

Manufacturing sector has the most job cuts over time because the prediction of China not surpassing them was wrong. Tech employment on the other hand almost never decreased.

While the surpassing is true, something I've found interesting is that across very different industries that have nothing to do with one another, and including publicly traded and private (though still huge) companies, I have heard directly from buyers that top management has given them a directive to find new suppliers in China.

From a supply chain management perspective, this does not make sense. The directive should be something like "find the best suppliers on the planet."

Only because their margins usually mean that those who do go out of business much sooner.

that's true but does tech generally hold a more aggressive default-growth stance?

Hi Hn,

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I built probabilistic version of it for my personal finance engine BullSheet.

Happy to hear your feedback and comments.

Hi HN,

First off: I am not selling a course, I am not launching a SaaS, and there is no sign-up link. There won't be any money making trading strategies either.

I’m a backend/infra engineer based in Berlin and I’ve been actively investing for years using excel sheets, obsidian, etc.

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Recently, after a lay off I decided to engineer my way out of that messy setup and built "BullSheet"

I thought some of you might be interested in the logic and architecture behind it.

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You should too.

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