I think programmers are best at automating aspects of their own work, which makes sense because it's what they are most familiar with. Sometimes people miss thi

I think programmers are best at automating aspects of their own work, which makes sense because it's what they are most familiar with. Sometimes people miss this because a lot of the "automation" doesn't seem like it, because it still requires skills to deploy, but it multiplies the productivity of a single programmer. An obvious example is how much system administration has been automated or replaced with scalable services. People used to get paid a lot just to handcode HTML, now you have WordPress and many other frameworks. But there is still enough demand out there for programming skills that the market has largely been able to absorb the new comers, which is how it should work. Innovation should free up people to do other things, but it's difficult to arrive at those other things during sluggish growth periods. I think the main problem is not the speed of technological progress, or automation, but that the response to the global recession ranged from inadequate to contrary to what economics teaches us. Because of how politicized economic topics have become, it's difficult to avoid the current state.