> The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed.

WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resume because typing has never been the problem.

I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks.

I honestly think a project managers job is actually a lot easier to automate, if you're going to go there (not that I'm hoping for anyone's job to be automated away). It's a lot easier for an engineer to learn the industry and business than it is for a project manager to learn how to keep their vibe code from spilling private keys all over the internet.

Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is. We're not smarter than anyone else and software development is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs. The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully automated says it all.