[egourlao]

My dad loves to tell this story about him going to engineering school in France in the 70's. He was suggested to stay away from CS or software by his guidance counselors - the reasoning? "We'll soon enough have programs able to write themselves - studying to be a software engineer is a dead end".

I'm not sure that some common engineering problems now being solved doesn't just mean that we can now redistribute that workforce on other unsolved problems, or to build new products on-top of those solutions.

[rhizome31]

I had a similar experience in France in the early 2000s. I went to the unemployment office (ANPE) to ask for a training and they told me that software was a dead end and that it wasn't possible to get training. So I did my own research, found a training organization and went back to the unemployment office giving them the exact reference of the training I wanted. The exact same person then reluctantly pulled a drawer of her desk and gave me an application form. That training kick-started my career in software.

Another thing that was commonly said over the 2000s period is that all software jobs would be quickly outsourced to India. That didn't happen either. Some big companies obviously tried that (and some still do) but a lot of them eventually realized that software wasn't something you could just specify and outsource to a team far away, with a different time zone, culture and language and expect to magically get working software as a result. In the meantime, I think that demand for software in India has also grown. I laughed at loud when in the early 2010s I received an email from an Indian recruitment agent offering me to come work in India.