[funnyfoobar]

I agree with the takes, but my only question would be.

If everyone is doing high level stuff like architecture and design, how many of "those people" will be really needed in the long term? My intuition is telling me the size of market needing number of engineers will shrink.

[bruce511]

Of course it will shrink! Every industry ever has shrunk as tooling got better.

That said, we are a long way from "peak software". There is a lot of scope for new things, so there's room for a lot of high-level people.

And of course the vast majority of current juniors won't step up at all. Just like the web site devs of the early '00s went off to be estate agents or car salesmen or whatever. Those with shallow training are easily replaced.

The wheel will turn though, and those with a quality, deep, education focused on fundamentals (not job-training-in-xxx-language) are best placed to rise up.

[gmreads]

Could you elaborate more? What would those said foundations and fundamentals be ?

[578_Observer]

That is the billion-dollar question.

My take: The market for "Coders" will shrink, but the market for "Problem Solvers who use Logic" will explode.

Think of "Scribes" (people who wrote letters for others) in the past. When literacy became universal, the job of "Scribe" vanished. But the amount of writing in the world increased billion-fold.

Engineering is becoming the new literacy. We won't be "Engineers" anymore; we will just be "People who build things." The title disappears, but the capability becomes universal.