Seems unlikely. A more plausible countertheory is that software is a very young industry and we're leaving the era where there were a lot of easy unknowns. The

Seems unlikely. A more plausible countertheory is that software is a very young industry and we're leaving the era where there were a lot of easy unknowns. The industry as a whole has figured out social networks, got a pretty good bead on the economics of software (especially open source). Databases are well developed, networking is well developed, new basic algorithms seem to have stopped appearing with regularity. We might not have killed software engineering as much as we are exhausting the list of things that very smart programmers will just figure out on their own.