[maxxxxx]

I bet a lot of the frontend guys will have problems when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web. It's harder now to develop a LOB app than when it was twenty years ago and I think this will change at some point. Same for a lot of "data scientists". Unless you are on the forefront of development there will be more and more tools that make the data accessible to regular people instead of having to go to data scientists.

Yes, software developers will always be in demand. The profession stays but the people in it get quickly marked as obsolete and replaced by new people.

[Daishiman]

The promise of visual designers has existed for the past 30 years and it has always blown up spectacularly because everything that can be made to conform to canned design principles is already there, and everything else actually requires non-trivial knowledge that is not easily automated.

Design guidelines change too, and accommodating existing software to new designs is not automatable either.

And for data science? Simple correlations are trivial, but doing useful data science requires domain understanding of the business and products and factors such as seasonality, markets and so on.

[brailsafe]

As someone who got into frontend as a more specific discipline from more generalized design/dev, I can say that my experience does comport. I don't know if I'd call it "blue collar" necessarily, but I'm looking for a job and it's tough to find the inspiration.

[meredydd]

> when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web

Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.

[maxxxxx]

This looks pretty good. I can see it work for a lot of in-house applications.

[ryuker16]

We had that for frontend for many years

It's called Adobe Muse.

Demand is still high as ever.