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> They make embarrassingly more than I do, have been programming for a scant few years, and I couldn't care less.

I think the bigger question is, with programming being made more common to the public (aka being taught in elementary school), will the supply/demand ratio that makes US development a six figure job go away with the influx of "new would-be coders"?

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Unlikely, it will just eliminate the "easy" jobs. Just look at writing, mass literacy surely eliminated many jobs but lawyers are still quite well compensated. Another area is mathematics with actuaries.

Democratization of computing will lead to greater stratification of programming jobs. The "Excel Programmer" won't exist being supplanted by the "Office Drone" whereas the "Distributed Systems Engineer" (or whatever) will keep on going.

Ops is getting commoditized through no-code/IaaS-turnkey solutions -- not there yet but I can see what is hard now, becoming easy for 80% of a business needs.

Time will tell. I think there will always be a market for people who can solve problems.

Programming may become a lot like maths in that it’s mainly used by other disciplines to get things done. Learning something other than programming itself will always be an asset.

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