The great thing about software is that each new piece of software that is written opens up more opportunities for writing new software than it closes off.<p>And the great thing about software writers is that each new writer creates more work opportunities for experienced code maintainers and rehabilitators than they could possibly create for themselves.<p>Combine those two great things, and you realize that as long as the software industry can grow wider faster than it can grow deeper, it must.  The tide of crap software with huge technical debt that will eventually have to be fixed by someone with real experience will only abate when everyone with the aptitude for writing software has already been doing it for a while.<p>At that time, people will be able to distinguish between a software writer that can maintain an existing CRUD app and one that can write new business-infrastructure software that scales across the entire enterprise.<p>That last category will be able to demand high compensation well into the foreseeable future, simply because the type of personality that has competitive advantage there is relatively rare in the general population.