There are certain fields in software engineering that, at least to me, appear to be getting automated away--or at least have become less important for most companies to worry about. Take cloud computing engineering for example. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have abstracted away a lot of the challenges in cloud computing, making it less important for companies to hire engineers in this area. The same goes for really any PaaS; many ML services have greatly reduced the demand for ML-exclusive engineers at companies, especially non-technical ones. There are even higher-level services such as Firebase that make backend development obsolete for many cases. What are your thoughts on this?
I see it as the boring parts of software engineering being automated away. The essence of software engineering remains relatively unchanged.<p>Cloud engineering is still important, but instead of worrying about keeping the OS updated, you can worry about creating policies for scaling up/down instances. This means you get to work on more interesting problems rather than the implementation details.<p>Until there are tools that can automate the human aspect of software engineering(understanding requirements and managing change), I don't think software engineering will be automated.