This blew up way more than I expected. Thanks everyone for the comments, I read almost all of them.
For the sake of not repeating myself, I would like to clarify/state some things.
1. I did not intend to signal that SWE will disappear as a profession, but would rather undergo transformation, as well as shrinking in terms of the needed workforce.
2. Some people seem to be hanging up to the idea that they are doing unimaginably complicated things. And sure, some people do, but I doubt they are the majority of the SWE workforce. Can LLM replace a cobol developer in financial industry? No, I don't think so. Can it replace the absurd amount of people whose job description can be distilled to "reading/writing data to a database"? Absolutely.
3. There seems to be a conflicting opinion. Some people say that code quality matters a lot and LLMs are not there yet, while other people seems to focus more on "SWE is more than writing code".
Personally, based on some thinking and reading the comments, I think the best way to future-proof a SWE career is to move to position that requires more people skills. In my opinion, good product managers that are eager to learn coding and combine LLMs for code writing, will be the biggest beneficiaries of the upcoming trend. As for SWEs, it's best to start acquiring people skills.
Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO.
I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered.
SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best architecture patterns and yet the biggest fear of every developer is working on legacy code, as it's an unmaintainable piece of ... written by humans.
Maybe I'm a lousy developer, true. But I do know now that your code does not matter. Unlike any other creative profession, what matters is the final output, and code is not the final output.
If companies can get the final output with less people, and less money, why would they pass on this opportunity? And please don't tell me that it's because people produce maintainable code and LLMs don't.
I think the idea of meritocracy has died in me. I wish I could be rewarded for my knowledge and expertise, but it seems that capitalism, as in maximizing profit, has won above everything else.
It's a good advice indeed. But there is a slight problem with it.
Young people can learn and fight for their place in the workforce, but what is left for older people like myself? I'm in this industry already, I might have missed the train of "learn to talk with people" and been sold on the "coding is a means to an end" koolaid.
My employability is already damaged due to my age and experience. What is left for people like myself? How can I compete with a 20 something years old who has sharper memory, more free time (due to lack of obligations like family/relationships), who got the right advice from Carmack in the beginning of his career?
I think coding will stay as a hobby. You know, like there are people who still build physical stuff with wires and diodes. None of them are doing it for commercial reasons, but the ability to produces billions of transistors on a silicon die did not stop people from taking electrical engineering as a hobby.
Everything you have described, apart from on-call, I think LLMs can/will be able to do. Explaining code, reviewing code, writing code, writing test, writing tech docs. I think we are approaching a point where all these will be done by LLMs.
You could argue about architecture/thinking about the correct/proper implementations, but I'd argue that for the past 7 decades of software engineering, we are not getting close to a perfect architecture singularity where code is maintainable and there is no more tech debt left. Therefor, arguments such as "but LLMs produce spaghetti code" can be easily thrown away by saying that humans do as well, except humans waste time by thinking about ways to avoid spaghetti code, but eventually end up writing it anyways.
But the problem is that the majority of SWs are like that. You can blame them, or the industry, bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. For every Tech Lead who does "people stuff", there are 5-20 engineers who, mostly, write code and barely know that entire scope/context of the product they are working on.
It's a good point, and I keep hearing it often, but it has one flaw.
It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the other part are "IC" roles like tech-lead/staff/etc, but the ratio between ICs and Engineers is, my estimate, around 1:10/20. So the majority of engineers are purely writing code, and engage in supporting actions around code (tech documentation, code reviews, pair programming, etc).
Now, my questions is as follows -- who has a bigger rate of employability in post LLM-superiority world: (1) a good technical software engineer with poor people/communication skills or (2) a good communicator (such as a PM) with poor software engineering skills?
I bet on 2, and as one of the comments says, if I had to future proof my career, I would move as fast as possible to a position that requires me to speak with people, be it other people in the org or customers.
Not, it's an approach from reality. I'm not going to slave away for an idea without getting rewarded for it. I'm not 21 years old to waste my life. I have a family and financial obligations to take care of.
If you want me to risk my future by taking an unpaid job, I want a big enough equity package. I'm not stupid to follow the "American dream" anymore.
I feel that most of it is pointless. I'm past the stage where I can argue with people over stupid engineering architecture decisions. It's all full of BS and ego.
Most people would rather die defending their favorite language/stack/framework than change their POV. I'm tired of wasting my time on countless meetings trying to "convince my engineering team-mates to write tests/use strongly typed languages/avoid new-age BS like lambda/k8s".
Sure, leadership feels like BS as well, but at least this BS IS the job. With coding, the job is to write code, which usually ends up being 20% of the work time anyway, so I'd rather do BS all-day and get paid for that (often times bigger salary), while doing my own thing with my own architecture and framework, than try to explain my manager why it takes 7 days to change the width of the button because the app is so over engineered that any line you touch creates a butterfly effect that can bring the entire organizations to bankruptcy.
Thanks. I want to move to something else that is not coding. Coding is too taxing on my mental health, and I don't think I can do it on someones terms anymore. I am trying to build a business on the side, but until it becomes profitable, I want to find a job where I can still make good money and support myself and my family.