De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling and http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming and http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f...

Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill.

(Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)