At certain points, this article touched on the commoditization of engineers and engineering skills. Beyond extremely simple things, it's never going to happen. Especially as you build a company and end up with a few monoliths through various acquisitions, all while concurrently hundreds of microservices. Things get too intricate and too hairy between systems. There's no amount of handwaving that will convince me that machines will replace Software Engineers anytime soon. Solving valuable, enterprise-scale problems will never be as simple as a Wix drag-n-drop solution.
I'm not so sure. I think this is something that's happening right under our noses -- it's just easy to miss it if you're not looking at the right thing.
Software engineers aren't being commoditized by being replaced by machines that write software. They're being commoditized by their own frameworks, libraries and tools.
Take the game industry as an example. Twenty years ago, your game company needed a big team of software engineers employed to write a game engine with advanced graphics capabilities (let's assume you want advanced graphics). Today, a single developer can just download Unity or Unreal Engine and have at least the technology available to them immediately (art is different but in many ways similar; automation and process improvements are coming for those jobs too, I'm sure).
So you don't need the same number of engineers for the same result. Sure, you have a big team of engineers employed at Unity Technologies or Epic Games, but that's now a shared resource. That employment is no longer duplicated at the companies that decide to use those engines.
Another example is the push for 'DevOps' and 'Cloud'. Think of all those system administrator jobs and IT departments being made smaller because now you can just spin up a server on AWS or have your CI infrastructure managed by BitBucket.
> Another example is the push for 'DevOps' and 'Cloud'
It's been my experience that delivering business value is taking longer because of this, not less. It's hubris to believe that a single person can be competent enough in all these domains to replace multiple people who focus on specific domains.
By distilling DBAs, Configuration Management Engineers, System Administrators and Software Developers into single people business is getting shittier products less frequently which incur more operational overhead.
Death by a thousand cuts sounds more believable. I concur with your position: instead of it being black-and-white, it could simply lead to less demand for engineers as the "building blocks" -- really common open source technologies with nearly omniscient presence -- are essentially commoditized.
On the other hand, I could also see a reality where, since many low-level problems are solved for you, management expects more out of you, so the number of engineers stays about the same, but you get a higher level of productivity.
Agree with your second paragraph and that's actually been my real-world experience. I also think there's another effect where commoditizing a technology leads to the creation of jobs that specialize in that technology. With easy-to-obtain game engines, suddenly more companies are interested in using them, which itself leads to an increase in demand for engineers, just with different skillsets.
I wouldn't put money on this balance lasting forever though. To me, that's too close to dismissively saying "it's different this time", with regards to our profession.
