At my job, a decade ago our developers understood how things worked, what was running on each server, where to look if there were problems, etc. Now the developers just put magic incantations given to them by the "DevOps team" into their config files. Most of them don't understand where the code is running, or even what much of it is doing. They're unable or unwilling to investigate problems on their own, even if they were the cause of the issue. Even getting them to find the error message in the logs can be like pulling teeth. They rely on this support team to do the investigation for them, but continually swiveling back-and-forth is never going to be as efficient as when the developer could do it all themselves. Not to mention it requires maintaining said support team, all those additional salaries, etc.
(I'm part of said support team, but I really wish we didn't exist. We started to take over Ops responsibilities from a different team, but we ended up taking on Dev ones too and we never should've done that.)
This blog has a brilliant insight that I still remember more than a decade later: we live in a fantasy setting, not a Sci-fi one. Our modern computers are so unfathomable complex that they are demons, ancient magic that can be tamed and barely manipulated, but not engineered. Modern computing isn't Star Trek TNG, where Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge each have every layer of their starship in their heads with full understanding, and they can manipulate each layer independently. We live in a world where the simple cell phone in our pocket contains so much complexity that it is beyond any 10 human minds combined to fully understand how the hardware, the device drivers, the OS, the app layer, and the internet all interact between each other.
Try tens of thousands of people. A mobile phone is immensely more complicated than people realize.
Thank you for writing it so eloquently. I will steal it.
There will always be work for people like us. It's not so bad. We're not totally immune to layoffs but for us they come several rounds in.