> have more in common with retail workers

They did this to automotive.

It was once a respected technology, and being a mechanic or factory worker was a high-paying job.

Now you have Jiffy Lube and some pimply kid in a polo!

Polofication

Has come for many industries...

And if retail was done the same way as it was 20 years ago, some kid in a polo shirt at Office Depot would be making small business websites using ChatGPT with a 1-hour turn-around time. Pay at the register, with your printer paper.

But Idk, I don't actually agree with you...

I think "software engineering" is such a spectrum now, a wide field of its own, that you can have deep research roles, high art, fashion, accounting, and executive-level work that involve it (which may have nothing to do with "consumer web design") that it's hard to make that blanket statement.

For example, the software engineer working on the computer in a Tesla, or the software on the displays in the BART train, or the banking infrastructure for Bank of America, is a lot more like a "real engineer" than the developer putting a marketing site on Vercel, or an iOS game on the App Store (each of which is vastly different work in their own right).

Everything is software now, every engineer is a software engineer now to some degree.