I got interested in programming in 2000 and graduated with a CS degree in 2009. Throughout the 2000s (remember this was post-dot com) I got told software was a bad field to get into for two reasons:

1) The advent of advanced tooling would make software engineers unnecessary. Tools like Visual Basic and UML diagrams were the tip of the iceberg of "visual coding" where a business person could just specify requirements and the software would be automatically created.

2) Jobs were all going to go overseas. There is no reason to pay a programmer in California 10x what you can pay someone in Mumbai. It's better to study something like finance where the secret domain knowledge is held within the chambers of ibankers in Manhattan. The future of tech startups is a few product managers in NYC outsourcing the coding work to India.

There's also a 3rd argument that gets floated around that the field will be oversaturated, "everyone" is learning to code, etc. In 2015 I asked a startup for 125k and they told me, while that did seem to be market at the time, they thought salaries had peaked and were going in the opposite direction. In 2020 you probably can't hire a bootcamp grad for 125k.

Since then the field has exploded and wages have gone off the charts, but I still hear the same type of arguments over and over.

In 2020, you hear stuff like:

1) AI is the future, it's going to automate away all of the menial programming jobs.

2) Bay Area is overcrowded, all the jobs are going remote. The future of tech startup is a few marketing execs in SF outsourcing the menial tech work to flyover states.

Personally, I didn't believe the hype then and don't believe the hype now. I find it amusing that the author questions the wisdom of Google for not using AI to automate development, as if that's never occurred to Google.

Of course the author is right that tech is a treadmill, new skills move into the spotlight while old ones become outdated, although even then the mass of legacy code means consultants will have lucrative jobs taking care of it for a long time.

In my experience, new tooling always creates more software jobs, not less. Software is not like high frequency trading, the more people that compete to make software, the more people we seem to need to make software.

Sure, Bay Area is getting insanely expensive, but Google still tries to fit as many as it can into Mountain View, Facebook still crams as many as it can into Menlo Park. Every 3 months some VC will have the bright idea that, what if we just pay people to do the lowly engineering work somewhere else and just have execs in the Bay Area? And 99% of those startups go nowhere and Google is worth a trillion dollars.

There is a very intuitive line of reasoning that goes, software can be done my machines and software can be done anywhere. There is a thread of truth to both those narratives, but it leads people to very incorrect conclusions that there won't be as many software jobs in the future and they will be done in cheap places.

Despite all intuition, and all the logical narratives about costs and automation, a group of people dedicated to technology in the same physical room have defied that intuition. Virtually every extremely important software company grew in the West Coast of the USA, in some of the most expensive places in the world, and the more software tools have improved the more headcount these companies have had. So take all this intuition about the end of days for software engineers with a huge grain of salt.