"We're not on the cutting edge of science, we're often not inventing anything new, we're just doing boring grunt work shoving things together. We're factory wor

"We're not on the cutting edge of science, we're often not inventing anything new, we're just doing boring grunt work shoving things together. We're factory workers. In 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation. We just happen to be in a time where there's still value in being able to manually translate 'what I want' into 'what computer understands'." Factory workers? Do you really believe that? Or are you saying that that is the way this work is seen by non-programmers? Also, "in 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation", may well by true for any job. Once there are machines that will do complex surgeries flawlessly, with access to all the medical knowledge in the world, people won't want a "stellar surgeon" either, for example. I wouldn't like to tell them that what they're doing is "factory work", though. :-)