> Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it.

Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.

If suddenly one developer can do the job of 3, then the other two will be assigned to some of the other unstaffed things they could be doing to also make the company money. Most places I’ve worked have a huge backlog of unstaffed work just waiting to be picked up.

That's just a disingenuous distortion of semantics. You're deliberately ignoring the key difference between skill-based, white-collar jobs and unskilled, blue-collar jobs. The former are not "destroyed" by productivity, as you put it. They change what the workers have to do, but the workers are, for the most part, able to adapt.

None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.

He may not have phrased it perfectly, but his point is good. Picture this: you are hired to do a contract job. The tooling today is arguably better than 20 years ago. You bill by the hour, and take fewer hours.

Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time).

This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual.

A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.

It depends on the demand "function." We only need so many socks. If sockmakers get more efficient, there'll be fewer sockmakers and prices will come down shrinking the industry.

In some cases, if productivity increases, and the price performance follows, we will consume far more of a thing, growing the market and employing more people.

One might argue that the money saved on sock purchases will be spend on other things, thus creating jobs in different industries.

We have way more work than we have time for (or the budget to hire that many more developers). If automation allowed each of us to do 3x more work, it probably still wouldn't be enough.

There are two types of products in this world, lawyers and cigarettes.

If manufacturing cigarettes gets more/less expensive, people will pay more/less for their cigarettes. If it takes fewer people to make cigarettes, fewer people will have jobs making cigarettes. The number of cigarettes smoked stays constant.

If you have more lawyers, you'll have more lawsuits, contracts and legal letters. If it gets easier to do contracts or lawsuits lawyers will take longer lunches. Lawyer fees stay constant.