Perhaps because of increased productivity with LLMs, especially for developers?
Increased productivity makes employees more valuable, not less.
Not necessarily. If there aren't enough tasks to make use of the increased productivity of the employees, it makes them less valuable, because the company can get away with fewer employees.
Have we saturated all tasks that can be done by computers through development?
The downvotes on your comments are weird. Maybe coming from an emotional place. I get it, I wouldn't want to be constantly reminded that the career I sacrificed so much for is a dead end. But it's true, at big companies there may be a ton of items in the backlog but none of them bring in more money. Having a bunch of idle engineers sitting around wastes money, and LLMs allow more engineers to do less. Why would a responsible VP keep around expensive employees who don't contribute to revenue?
You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.
You’re getting downvoted because for most of us this is our biggest nightmare