I foresee the need for engineers to be really "wavy".

I have personally never been busier or more productive. It's like all the "work" of my work has disappeared. There are no more blockers and I can just run free and get as much done as I want and the only thing slowing me down is Jira.

The real downturn is going to be the SaaS apocalypse. In the next year or two there will be a reckoning where all these expensive low-code/no-code middleware applications suddenly don't make sense.

So I think it will be less about the ranks of engineers being thinned out unilaterally, and more about large swathes of products being obsolete.