An electrical engineer, on the other hand, does design work.

To a degree. I get the contrast you're drawing and don't really disagree. But an electrician (like plumbers/contractors/etc.), especially working in an older building, has to deal with a lot of unexpected circumstances that have to be dealt with. There's a lot of problem-solving involved.

So I told him I'd do the low voltage wiring myself. Those have to be separated from the A/C wires by a couple feet, and only cross them at 90 degree angles. No hum.

Inductive coupling is something a first year EE student would learn about.

Of course, the day comes when the high level abstractions of your youth are referred to as "low level". And while that may seem silly to people who write machine code, there is something low level-ish about managing your own database connections and/or writing your own resource pool.

Almost everything we do is routinely turned into, well, routine work. Rails automated a lot, but not all, of what I did. I'm tiptoeing close to a "no true scotsman" argument here, but I'd almost define "programming" as writing code that hasn't been automated yet - which is why the job of being a programmer won't be automated.

Here's why I think my argument is almost, but not quite, a "no true scotsman" fallacy. I have a lot of trouble seeing how anything could replace human programmers, but that's the rub - the way it happens, should it happen, will surprise me. The analogy I have in my head is someone who is trying to create a mechanical turk to replace a symphony orchestra. A wind up doll to play a violin, trumpet, piano. There are a few successes, with self playing pianos, but overall, it appears to be distant.

And then... an unanticipated concept, one that blows your mind: it turns out that you can actually capture music, exactly as it was played, with a device that will project that sound back just as it was made the first time. You can play the symphony once, and listen to it an unlimited number of times. And just like that, live music played by a human goes from 99% of all music heard to well below 1%.

We could very well be replaced, but not as we are. I think it'll be something different, that provides what we provided, in a way that makes us largely unnecessary.

Its not AI but it turns even complex projects into things that anyone can learn to do in months . I can't imagine this remaining so well paying in such circumstances.

Smart programmers move up the value chain as needed so that they're still doing work that can't be done easily with an existing product.

So that begs the question , what are some of the things that are right now higher up the value chain ?

Programming has not gotten easier really, I don't think it will ever be blue collar. Even though development will get easier as technology and tools improve, the bar for what good is is set by our peers. Knowing some html/css/Js was a totally acceptable skillset in 2000, but now you need to have some backend and networking or design/ui/ux skills to be relevant.

Yes, software developers will always be in demand. The profession stays but the people in it get quickly marked as obsolete and replaced by new people.

Design guidelines change too, and accommodating existing software to new designs is not automatable either.

And for data science? Simple correlations are trivial, but doing useful data science requires domain understanding of the business and products and factors such as seasonality, markets and so on.

Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.

It's called Adobe Muse.

Demand is still high as ever.

Maybe more of a light blue collar.

Nothing you make will be particularly interesting, but you will make an excellent living for yourself.