There is no guarantee that there will be a boom again. Some jobs disappear. Maybe we'll really only need a handful of elite engineers who continue advancing the foundational tools we use (kernels, databases, hyperscale low level cloud products, drivers, etc.) and the rest of "programmers" and "software engineers" will be replaced by "prompt engineers". With a new generation mostly unable to read and reason about source code.
There will always be some nerds left with brains so big they only scratch their itch if they are advancing performance critical v8 code in pure assembler. But the bar will rise for that to be something you get money for…
