My take : At some point in the mid-to-distant future, most human labor (certainly white collar labor) will potentially be automated away, with remaining blue c

My take : At some point in the mid-to-distant future, most human labor (certainly white collar labor) will potentially be automated away, with remaining blue collar labor not far behind (the physical interface, e.g. general purpose robots that are superior to humans in non-static environments will probably come last). Until that point, the demand for a technically literate workforce will continue to grow, simply because the number of potential areas of application will also continue to grow. With every new digital encroachment on our analogue lives, we find new business verticals that previously simply didn't exist. I don't see that trend abetting anytime soon. Put differently, it's not like software development ends with webapps. For every domain that gets commoditized, there will almost guaranteed be new ones in need of hands on skilled labor. There will of course be some developers who aren't as effectively able to reposition themselves for new verticals (we've all probably heard some anecdote of a C programmer who simply couldn't grok OOP, etc.), but by and large it's difficult for me to see the demand for human-generated bespoke software development dissipating until we get close to that mythical land of general AI. Now, on the payscale side I do agree with the author that the push towards remote work will definitely have an impact on many of our salaries that are currently tightly bound to geography. That seems fairly evident, to be honest. I live in northern Europe where our salaries are quite good relative to other parts of the continent, but you can still find high quality engineers for <$100k USD - many of whom are on par with FAANG developers being paid >$200k in SFBA or Seattle and the like. The further east / south you go, the lower the current salaries are. It seems logical that decentralization of work will lead to a flattening of the income curve - raising some incomes, lowering others - as we increasingly all enter the same digital playing field. That said, wages - like housing prices - are to use econ parlance 'sticky downwards' so if I were still a SV developer I wouldn't start losing sleep yet.