> Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.

You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day.

> If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable.

I don't follow this argument - there is a practical limit to how much development a company requires. In the past they may have had a team of 10 to satisfy that limit. If the limit is satisfied by a team of 2 the company... does what exactly?

After all, a limit is a limit.

Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained.

Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

> Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money.

So has every company I've ever been in, but at the same time, there problem was never production, it was always sales.

No company I have ever been in had the problem of "demand is so large that even if we double output we still cannot satisfy it".

Both things are true at the same time - companies want to produce more, but their rate of production is not the limiting factor, the rate of sales is.

> Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

Where did I make that claim? What companies want is to sell more stuff, but production is not what is preventing them from selling more stuff.

Doubling production in a company does not lead to doubling sales - an increase in one never causes the other.

In companies I've worked for, Sales has often come to management saying things like:

* I couldn't sell our product because our competitor's has a certain feature. How soon can we have that feature? * I can't make any new sales, but prospective customers keep telling me they need a solution for a similar problem. Could we expanded our product line? * Some customers could be using a certain feature of our product, but they find it too confusing. What could we do about this? * A big customer told me they have a problem our current product doesn't solve, so I told them we would be able to solve it by the beginning of next month

As you say, the sales department is the driver of development work, not vice versa.

I'm currently in the sales channel, and all customers say things like this, then back off the minute a quote is sent through. It's so common it's even easy to spot now:

1. When a manager at some client says "How much will it costs us for you to add $FOO to the product?" I don't even bother updating the sales forecast with the quote I send them.

2. When they say "How soon can we have this?", that's when I actually update the sales forecasts.

So if your sales guys are saying "Look, customer said they'd go with us if only we had $FOO", they're failing the Mom Test[1] - the person they spoke just didn't want to be too negative, didn't know how to say "No" to a charming and likeable person[2], etc.

Sales is a function of the demand in the market. When the demand is (for example) 200 units/m of something, doubling your output does not let you sell 400 units/m.

Also, it sounds that your argument is for software products only, which is a tiny part of the economy. I was really talking about companies that sell non-software products/services - their sales is not limited by software development, it's limited by their market reach.

Even if those companies doubled their developer headcount, it'll have pretty much zero impact on revenue.

I mean, look, I can see you're arguing in good faith here, so I'm trying to do the same, but IME productivity simply doesn't have any effect on revenue, all it can do is lower costs.

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[1] This is such a short and valuable read, that I recommend it to everyone I meet who is trying to do sales.

[2] If you're not charming or likeable, then you shouldn't be in sales in the first place.