I partly disagree. Many software/devices are doing work that human can't possibly do in reasonnable time (measurement tools). For other industries like EDA the progress would not have been the same without these tools, how long would it take to place manually billions of transistors ? He's also forgetting about the many non-dev people like management who are also "living by the sword" and are not that much perishing by it. That's a bit hypocritical to kind of tell engineers "you deserved it" if you forget a part of the story.