EE and SWE are both very wide paths to travel along.
As for javascript kiddies ---- I suppose you're right, I don't know. And I share your frustration with a new framework solving the same problems we fixed 20 years ago. I get that.
However, CS that drives the world forward -- that stuff --- is not 'turning the crank'. To the extent that any profession is 'turning the crank' --- that is the extent to which some automated systems will be doing that soon enough.
I've done EE, RF, Analog, Digital and much more. That stuff is trivial (and I mean trivial) compared with, say some of the stuff that this guy does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
I can tell you where the 'hard stuff' is in EE: it's in getting to electronic devices & circuits that perform near the limits of what physics allows. Extremely low noise, extremely fast switching, extreme power, those areas. And, yes, those folks have to be clever. Generally, most of those people are building chips, not doing what normal EEs do -- which is connect chips together --- and gluing chips together is trivial, this is my point.
Maybe it's just easy for me, that's possible. But I'm not that smart, so I dunno.
There is a reason Marc of a16z says Software Eat World, and not EE Eat World.
>For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
Surely you jest. From what I can see the "always something that must be mastered and pronto" is simply javascript kids justifying their inflated salaries by rewriting their codebases in new frameworks every few months only to rediscover bad solutions to problems that were solved a decade ago.