weeelvil

Agree 100%, although the same could be said of UI developers back before “middleware” (browsers, decent ui frameworks, etc). That shit was hard and required geometry and matrices. Occasionally your CSS guru today will touch on that stuff (that is the 1%), but with thousands of libraries or working implementations at their disposal. I think this will happen eventually in all specializations - you will eventually have your “ML devs” that invoke a library to recognize a hotdog in an image etc.

Im not saying this type of work cant be complex (again, usually because “someone fucked up somewhere”), but it certainly doesn’t have to be.

I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere.

Certainly there are specializations that are pushing the edge of research, but we are talking about an industry here, not the few research-y jobs that still exist.