Comment by josho

I see this coming from a much smaller perspective as well.

If one would reflect back on the applications that they've built in their career I suspect a number of those applications are now available generally as packaged software with customizable components.

E.g. The dawn of the web saw many publishing, & catalog systems being built. Now you don't need to, you can simply grab a commercial or OSS package and customize it for your needs. Same is true for document management, workflow.

This hasn't impacted jobs yet because we are still early in this industry, and growth is still outpacing this commoditization. But, yeh, I see the day where software developers become quite rare and software customizers are common.

The tricky challenge is organizing our labour efforts. It's already easy for IT organizations to outsource development to cheaper markets, I fear labour organization would accelerate that movement.