Technology

Well, that would be the 3rd or 4th thing during my career that was supposed to make my job a thing of the past or at least severely reduce the need for it.

(If I remember it correctly, OO design were supposed to reduce the need for programmers, as were various languages, then there was Outsourcing, visual programming and on the server-side I vaguely remember various frameworks being hailed as reducing the need for programmers because people would just be able to wire modules together with config or some shit like that. Additionally many libraries and frameworks out there aim to reduce the need for coding)

All of them, even outsourcing, have made my skills be even more in demand - even when they did reduce the amount of programming needed without actually increasing it elsewhere (a requirement were already most failed) the market for software responded to that by expecting the software to do more things in more fancy ways and with data from more places, effectively wiping out the coding time savings and then some.

Granted, junior developers sometimes did suffer because of those things, but anything more complicated than monkey-coder tasks has never been successfully replaced, fully outsourced or the need for it removed, at least not without either the needs popping up somewhere else or the expected feature set of software increasing to take up the slack.

In fact I expect AI, like Outsourcing before it, in a decade or so is going to really have screwed the Market for Senior Software Engineers from the point of view of Employers (but a golden age for Employees with those skills) by removing the first part of the career path to get to that level of experience, and this time around they won't even be able to import the guys and galls in India who got to learn the job because the Junior positions were outsourced there.