[akkartik]

This whole comment needs a big "citation required". It's all anecdotes and speculation.

Tech displaces industries, yes, but in the history of tech there has never been a company that stopped needing software engineers.

If you ask your surgeon he'll tell you how many times he feels he's retrained in his 40 year career. It's not going to be 0.

And don't your two paragraphs contradict each other? Isn't the need to retrain every 5-10 years a big sign that software engineers are not going anywhere?

I would agree with everything you wrote if it was prescriptive rather than normative. I would like software engineers to work themselves out of a job. And I'd like technology to be stable so we can focus on something besides the tech aspect of a company. But that seems poles apart from the world we live in.