I disagree that airline pilots == software developers. Airline pilots operate the plane thus the relationship to system operators is better. Plus that profession is seeing a decline as the cloud consumes server rooms.

Second I disagree because writing code is a creative process. Each new program, app or bot is a new artifact that requires its own design, promotion and maintenance. There is no reason to expect a decline in new software technologies for the foreseeable future.

Third, planes hit a plateau. Once supersonic planes failed commercially in the 1990’s, flying jets became a well defined profession and a career path for retiring military pilots. Test pilots became very, very rare.

Expertise in some types of coding does become more common. For example, no doubt the tasks of webmaster of the ’90s does not pay as well now. But nodejs, AI, serverless apps, bots and many other new technologies require engineering skills. This is the evolution of programmer, software analyst, database admin, webmaster, jQuery hacker, nodejs coder, etc follows. And this creative process will continue. Software engineer will be replace by some new title too. No plateau in sight.

Software engineers should be concerned with obsolescence but that is not the same as obsolete as McLuhan’s Laws of Media explains. When a technology enters obsolescence it often in the most profitable phase while the technology is still actively used. Technologies rarely die, for example, they still make new buggy whips.

The challenge for software engineers is take your expertise and apply it to the new technology that is obsolescing the old. Unless you want to be an artist. Either way, keep attending conferences and working on your side projects.