[Pfhreak]

Also, as a separate comment, the day will come where software development is automated in some capacity. All the high skill workers may be competing with workers with much less training at lower wages.

The Luddites are a good cautionary tale about when you should protect your working conditions and rights (when the demand for your services is at its peak). So many engineers I talk to these days say things like, "Why would I want to organize/engage in collective bargaining now? My life is good!" rather than, "My work is highly desirable, and my employer might actually come to the negotiating table because it is challenging to replace us right now."

[indigochill]

Software development is already highly automated relative to what it once was. That's what high-level languages are. I expect we will continue to develop even higher-level languages in the future. Some people are only capable of programming in high-level languages because of a lack of understanding of the rest of the stack (and this goes both down into the hardware and up into DevOps that even CS grads are largely unequipped to work with).

I think textile manufacturing is distinct from software engineering, though, because unlike textile demand which is fairly limited (people only need so much fabric), the demand for new software will always exceed supply because the space of useful applications of general-purpose computation is effectively infinite. I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

[DasIch]

This is already happening. Squarespace, Shopify and to some extent Facebook certainly have an impact on the lower end of web development.

Once upon a time you needed to hire someone to get a website for a small business going, now you can do this yourself for a small fee.

[jude-]

> the day will come where software development is automated in some capacity.

It already is. It's called a compiler.

[smitty1e]

Then there are DevOps pipelines and scanning tools.

[antonvs]

> The Luddites are a good cautionary tale about when you should protect your working conditions and rights

But at that point, you'd be doing exactly what the Luddites were doing, which was attempting to hold back the natural consequences of technological advancement.

The (temporary) end state of that kind of thing are artificially inefficient situations where someone is paid an unreasonably well to do something that could be done much more efficiently by a machine.

That's a temporary end state because at some point, the people and organizations doing that will be definitively out-competed, and that particular instance of Luddism becomes another historical footnote.