Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

I wasn't working then, but from my understanding (might be wrong), it was 'html coders' that had difficulty finding jobs, not actual coders.

Stop patting yourself on the back. Seriously.

Because obviously, no other job requires critical thinking and learning continually. These are "skills" that are in no way related to programming, and do not explain an inclination towards CS rather than any other science or the myriad of other academic disciplines. And even outside academia, not every job is just that of the "sheeple" who "mindlessly" "slug away" in their "boring" and "thoughtless" jobs.

If you do a job for a long while, chances are you will have to adapt to new developments. Take craftsmen for example. Every year, new areas become part of their trade, from new building materials to new requirements, from new technologies to new standards. The electrician of today might also have to deal with laying network cables, with photovoltaics etc. Carpenters deal with new materials for insulation, new structural possibilities and requirements etc. etc. Secretaries and office workers moved from typewriters to PCs, from OS to OS and often from program to program.

I know it is particularly popular in IT to foam out of the mouth about the "clueless" average users who do not get the simple feature X or Y of a given software, but at the same time, the same people will happily admit their own inaptitude in many other professional areas.

There have been numerous threads on pg's "founders' accents" remarks, and there, all of a sudden, it is the most normal thing in the world that not everybody finds the same things equally easy, important or possible. Yet when it comes to programming, there obviously exists no such thing, rather, there are naturals, those gifted enough for this divine trade, and then there are all the others. The average user, with stress on the average as opposed to the extraordinary.

I am sorry that this rant is directed directly at you, but I find the sheer arrogance of your two one-line remarks baffling.

If you are talking about the front end of a corporate site then sure, you can do that in WP. Don't think many would though; maybe for the grocery shop, but other than that?

Even relatively small businesses in my neighborhood with not much cash to spend start out with a 'cheap WP' site, but then they want reservation systems integrated with their CRM. They want a live chat system. Integrated with their CRM. They want their reservation system connected to online partners. Etc. In a few months after starting out with this site, WP or anything else is no longer relevant; existing solutions need to be integrated manually anyway and custom solutions made by, for instance, the CRM/reservation system which do not use WP are a better fit. At a much higher price. And people pay it, because custom integration is even more expensive.

Even with all it's plugins, WP is only a good solution if you like to do a lot of work manually or you want to spend a lot of money having every plugin and external package nicely integrated. And no inexperienced programmers is going to bring that to a good end without landing on reddit/hn as being responsible for making some epic security holes along the way.

The thing about development, and it certainly may slow down eventually, especially as Moore's law staggers to a halt and broadband peaks, is that no matter what I build, everybody always, always, always wants more. Every framework I ever developed or integrated was met with a doubling of people's expectations. Make it better, make it slicker, give me this feature, et cetera. I think we've got between 40 and 50 years before we can even suggest hitting saturation with our current technical capabilities.

Web developers are the COBOL developers of this generation.

Software engineering at its core is a universal skill whose applications will almost certainly have a shelf life of hundreds of years, though the various particular demand curves for specific applications of those skills is sure to vary wildly over time. Now would be an advisable time to start expanding your horizons if your core skill set revolves around creating web applications.