Compilers and high-level languages assuredly reduced the number of engineers needed, right? …

Compilers and high-level languages assuredly reduced the number of engineers needed, right? No: we just started making much more complicated things and the basic level of "this isn't even a serviceable solution" has gone up so high that if you sat around and wrote a trivial program designed to be used over a teletype--which is much much easier as you can do it in C instead of assembly--you'd lose in the market to your competitors who are willing to put in the effort to build a modern fancy reactive single-page whatever's-hot-now web app. The reality is that companies are going to continue allocating a similar percentage of their budget to tech that they were before, and what we DO might change a ton; but, frankly, I've been doing this now for 30 years, and the stuff I used to do 30 years ago already often isn't a thing anymore. Every time my job gets easier, the expectations for the products I architect also increase, because we're all in a rat race attempting to compete for the same customers to defend our margins. …