What's weird about software engineering is you can literally be on all three ladders.
That high-paid 60 year old man working for his state's labor department keeping the COBOL churning out unemployment checks? High-skill labor.
That university researcher who's working night and day to design a new machine learning paradigm? She's an elite creative (Hell, she might even be a Ph.D. and a blue check mark nowadays).
The Stanford / UCLA / MIT dropout who builds the next Uber / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook? Working rich. At least until he/she sells the company to someone and bails out.
However, those tools are used for business purposes that create a significant amount of value for the business. And the learning curve of using them within any particular business is generally pretty high. This naturally puts software engineers in a position of high leverage, which happens to be the currency of the elite.
I'm surprised, personally I would put software engineer akin to a new-age factory worker, but worse for multiple reasons. This is taking into account how many new software engineers are joining and where the field is going in general, sure some are doing novel work but most are definitely not.
That high-paid 60 year old man working for his state's labor department keeping the COBOL churning out unemployment checks? High-skill labor.
That university researcher who's working night and day to design a new machine learning paradigm? She's an elite creative (Hell, she might even be a Ph.D. and a blue check mark nowadays).
The Stanford / UCLA / MIT dropout who builds the next Uber / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook? Working rich. At least until he/she sells the company to someone and bails out.