[kyllo]

The point is, building a CRUD app is a task that has been done so many times, and frameworks like Rails, Django, Play, et al have abstracted away the challenging parts to the point where it's no longer a technically hard problem and does not require a particularly skilled programmer. The current crop of frameworks are now just one level of abstraction away from the point where a non-programmer will be able to build a functioning CRUD app with a few mouseclicks (just like Wordpress), at which point it will no longer be necessary to employ professional programmers to build them. With the next generation of CRUD app frameworks, they'll be able to give that task to someone like a business analyst, who has other responsibilities and who they can pay much less than they would have to pay someone with a CS degree.

Programming belongs on the cutting edge, the place where we build things that were never possible before. CRUD apps are about collecting data, but that problem has been solved already. Now the problem is we have too much data and aren't sure how to make sense of all of it. So the cutting edge is now at building machine learning algorithms on top of MapReduce processing, to automate high-level decisionmaking based on massive, diverse, distributed sets of data. That's where the important "engineer" jobs are going to be.