Something I keep thinking about is that 100 years ago we had a huge cadre of workers called "clerks," whose job was basically to gather, organize, and transfer information. You'd think those people would be replaced by computers, but there's always a bit of complexity in each transaction that needs the human touch: Does this ECO make sense, for instance.

Outside of engineering, a lot of people with "manager" titles are similarly engaged. Their supervisory work, while important, is about 4 hours of work per week. The rest of the time is spent on tasks assigned to them, such as creating a new process for replenishing the hand sanitizer, or approving documents.

It's just that we believe that by now we should have eliminated clerks, so to make ourselves seem modern, we re-title them engineers and managers.