Pretty much all USB chips have a fully programmable CPU when you go into the data sheets. It feels silly for simple hid or charging devices but basic microcontrollers are cheap and actually save costs compared to asics.
The closest I could find - with your search query - was #6, and it’s a Reddit conversation that contains this link. I don’t usually click on Reddit links.
Yeah sure, people on HN says this all the time, but in reality it isn't true like a lot of comments getting repeated on here. I found it on the first try.
Nah - there are lots of places where you need EEs still. Anything that interfaces with the world. Having programmability does not move most challenges out of the domain of EE. Much of it is less visible than the output of a software role perhaps.
There will always be problems that can only be solved by an EE, chem eng, mech eng, etc.
But the juiciest engineering challenges involve figuring out business logic / mission decisions. This is done increasingly in software while the other disciplines increasingly make only the interfaces.
Where I work they were considering using an FPGA over an MCU for a certain task but decided against it because the FPGA couldn’t reach the same low power level as the MCU
