I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.
I'm not disputing productivity improvements can lead to smaller teams, particularly in a shareholder-driven org; that's a separate conversation, IMO. The fact I work at an employee-owned organization, currently, I suppose I'm simultaneously a worker and an influential shareholder.
I was trying to say, running counter to what is frequently mentioned on HN about FAANG Eng Leaders, that I don't equate engineering success with growing headcount. I've always preferred building small, highly effective teams that can accomplish more without needing to grow, just for the sake of growing headcount. My want to do more with the same number of people isn't an argument that headcount won't shrink. It's an argument that growing headcount was never my measure of success in the first place.
No that you asked, but, my measures of success are: are my engineers happy (being that many of them have worked with me at least one company before, and one at 4, I feel they are); are we playing with the latest technologies; and are we learning new things every day?
So do I, but I've been in two companies that had to let me go because the investors said they didn't want my role to exist any more. Plus two other roles where the company straight up ran out of money.
It's not always up to us.
First it was offshoring, then managed cloud environments and servless, followed by ready made SaaS products, low code/no code iPaaS cloud products, and now agentic runtimes.
The ones doing content translations, asset management were the first, followed by classical infrastructure people, then most backend roles, and so it goes.