[bitL]

I am worried about the latter aspect as well - in order to keep automation going, very advanced developers would have to be involved; if the whole "easy job" ecosystem disappears, there won't be any reasonable way to keep developers progressing, with best in a competition filling up the spots at "cognitive automators".

[gervase]

In the absence of on-the-job experience/growth for less-experienced developers, it forces them back into more academic training programs. I personally think this is likely to lead to exacerbated "degree inflation", where MS degrees will be the new minimum expectation for these new "entry-level" (read, Tier 2+) jobs.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

A significant number of companies who can benefit from automation likely won't need to continue to automate indefinitely. I work in software development/automation and in my industry it's more about finding and configuring a framework that enables business users to configure software systems than about automating everything possible.

Even relatively rote software development that involves embedding business logic into a software system is likely safe as long as the cost of continuing to develop that software is close to the cost of switching to some other framework. It's when the cost of development is much greater than the cost to try another framework out, or when a company wants to expand something and doing so on the development side would be cost prohibitive, that someone's job could be on the line.