Combine that with the fact that big companies (like Google) release SDKs that make application development trivial, and you've got a recipe for the skill cap lowering along with wages.
The skillset of building a personal website, or even a website for your small business should be something anyone can do, and will in no way impact the overall salary of software engineers in the future.
Major companies will always need people who understand the computational sciences, as scale and complexity follow some of the same rules as entropy, in that they are always increasing.
Additionally, the reason for high salaries is not a lack of engineers, it is that top companies have decided that it is in their best interest to outbid each other for top talent. In parts of the midwest, where there is less competition, engineers are already paid 50k a year.
I am constantly surprised that when other CS students in my classes have zero idea how anything beyond the particular language we're learning works. Even in higher skill-level classes that require a fair amount of proficiency with the language if you asked what the length of the pointer they just properly used was all you would get is blank stares.
and
> "if you asked what the length of the pointer they just properly used was all you would get is blank stares"
So what is it?
It's a computer science program, not learn a dozen language's quirks and implementation detail that you use for a single class to understand some concept.
The new class of programmers that governments and Google want to train up from your average worker will not be as skilled or intelligent as the current generation of programmers. But, there are still opportunities for them in software development. They will take jobs that pay 40-60k a year, while the higher skilled and more intelligent programmers will be architects or leads who command much higher salaries.
There will be a differentiation between Engineers and Coders soon. Hooking up to a few different APIs, doing some JS and HTML does not count as engineering.