So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.
I think it's plausible that the superfluous hirings are caused by hirings of key individuals.
It's quite common for these big tech companies to poach each others department heads and other key personnel. This can cause significant damage to a company so can be an attractive tactic. The downside is that in order to retain these people you don't just have to pay them a lot of money you also have to give them big projects and resources to implement them, i.e. lot's of people get hired. This can a problem when these projects aren't supported by the wider company but are just someones pet project.
(edit: parent originally claimed 30 million professional software engineers worldwide, then edited in a revised estimate of 13 million.. which is in the ballpark of my original figure? :)
Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. The number depends entirely on the definition - are all IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, that's about 24 million.
I am talking about full-time SWEs.
In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement. What a relief! :D
We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation.
Yeah sorry I did edit the number down based on digging deeper into my link based on your comment here. I still think 0.3% (my original number was 0.1%) is not a meaningful amount of engineers for a "starve the rest of the world of talent" strategy to work.
Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others)
So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.