When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience.

Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.

And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.

And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have.

For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.

I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.

The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.

So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.

So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.