For example, in the times before we had factories for making things, everything was done by hand and you had to become an apprentice and go through years of training before becoming a true craftsman. But after much of the process was automated, factories could afford to hire lower-skilled workers for lower pay and operate with greater efficiency.

I'm seeing the same pattern in the world of programming. There was a time when the task of programming required more skill from the programmer, but the programming languages, tools and development environments have evolved since then, and now a lot of things can be accomplished by people with little amount of training.