I have a feeling the party's over for good for software engineers. The industry has had a lot of time to build up abstractions and deliver them via frameworks and SaaS products. Now the market is mature - everyone and their mom is glued to the internet, cozy with their well-worn apps. I'm struggling to think of some new frontier that will require mass quantities of raw skilled labor. At least not in our lifetime. This is the internet boom come to rest.
In 1 year I can stand up a system big enough that it would require 2 engineers to manage its ongoing maintenance, feature requests, bug fixes, 3rd party API updates, etc
More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and onβ¦
And you would've needed 4 engineers to build your in-house payment and fulfillment systems, except now you just pay Stripe and Shopify.
Oh, and 1 of those engineers is a "React engineer", who operates purely at the level of that framework, following boilerplate and documentation like a cook book, who would've otherwise been left out of the industry altogether but is now delivering as much value as someone who put in the work to understand JS, single-threaded UI, web browsers, network protocols...
