Ironically, I can make the case that programming killed Real(TM) technical competence. "Back in my day you had to solve dense differential equations to design

Ironically, I can make the case that programming killed Real(TM) technical competence. "Back in my day you had to solve dense differential equations to design a circuit to get a filtered output on a amplifier! And then you had to manually build it! Nowadays these kids just use libraries and pass it variables to get the output they want!" I don't think technical competence goes away, it just changes form from what you recognize as technical competence.