Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

But the high salaries are just a question of supply and demand, because for 20 or so years there was always a need for more programmers (well, at least senior ones). Reduced demand should naturally be reflected by reduced salaries (or benefits).

"Not all programming problems can be solved with pattern matching"

Says who? How do you know if solving programming problems is not just advanced pattern matching?

The fact that we find most (if not all) of our solutions on SO or talking to colleagues points towards the pattern matching hypothesis quite strongly.

To be clear: I am talking about the programming aspect of the job only, not the other important things (talking to customers/product managers, crafting solutions, etc.)

Obvious point: we're the most expensive kind of non-finance individual-contributor employee.

Equally obvious: nobody is going to replace the most expensive kind of employee, the CEO.

Less obvious point: software engineers sometimes say no. LLMs don't. They'll always give you something, even if it doesn't work or has security holes. The idea of shipping worse products at higher speed is incredibly tempting to sales types.

If you think the app store is bad now, wait until you see what level of AI sloppification is possible when anyone can turn out hundreds of clones of any popular apps.

I’ll believe it when I can page an AI at 3AM, go back to sleep, and have it autonomously root-cause and fix a production outage no matter the cause.

I mean.. they're a big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning. Not to mention, you often need the engineers more than you, given how much time it takes them to ramp up, and how hard it is to find quality ones, so they get to demand high wages (often while not really doing that great of a job---looking at you, average college hire who's not aspiring to be any sort of leader or expert in their field). If you ran a company you'd want to replace them also.

(None of that has anything to do with whether it's just for the world to operate this way. Personally I'd like to see all engineer wages go down and owner/shareholder returns go down and all that money go to lesser-paid roles or cheaper prices. But we lived in a version of capitalism that doesn't presently seem to present a way to do that...)

Personally I think programming will be 10x as efficient in the not-so-distant future (25 years maybe), and that everyone vaguely understands this: that what we're doing today is in some sense a waste of effort. Similar to building a road or railroad with hundreds of manual laborers instead of a few big machines.