There is overemployment in software development right now and a correction is coming. Automation is just a part of it, because automated systems displace jobs and create new ones. The biggest problem, in my view, is that large swathes of software development jobs were created under ZIRP and subsidized by excess profits to suppress competition and shore up those excess profits.

Technology is a convenient escape goat and a lot of glue-code gigs were made possible by the market distortions I mentioned. But I do think a big correction is taking place and we may have passed the high water mark of employment in software development. Especially cushy jobs being overpaid to configure frameworks, as this sort of work is proving quite tractable for LLMs.

I do think there will be more opportunities in high skill software engineering created by the new tooling on both sides - demand for building and maintaining automated systems as well as dealing with the consequences security, reliability, etc, wise. At this level the industry has been short staffed for several years and that trend should intensify I believe. There is lots of money to be made in being very knowledgeable on fundamentals and detail oriented. That has been true for a while and it seems to me that it will be only more so for the foreseeable future.