My point wasn't about demand though. I'm well aware it flags behind SW companies by a staggering margin. A small team of SE's with enough money to buy some laptops between them can create multi-million dollars worth of value in a few years. It would take a team of EEs 5x the time and 25x the initial investment to create the same. Of course there are going to be 100's of SE companies for every EE one.

My comment was regarding supply. EE is an art that blossomed in the 80s and 90s in terms of practicing engineers, and has shrunk per capita since. This is largely driven by kids getting drawn into SWE over EE as people look at salaries and modern day billionaires, and figure it to be a no-brainer. Today EEs are a small fraction of the total engineering disciplines, despite being essential for the communication, power generation, distribution, consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, and of course, the computer hardware industry on which the software one is built; amongst many other growing sectors like robotics, medical, and IoT.

If there are a legion of EEs are set to retire in the next 5-10 years, and all the would-be EEs are now designing web apps, surely at some point the supply/demand scales start to tip one way? Many of the above industries are abstracting everything to software platforms as time goes on, but no amount of money can make a SW dev design a power-train for a car, antenna for a 5G device, or program an FPGA for silicon verification.

Bear in mind, though, that a lot of those EEs going into software are doing so not because they love software, but because they can't find EE jobs. Sure, many are no doubt doing it for the money, but if they really wanted to be programmers, they'd have majored in CS.

The context OP setup was “when grey beards retire.”

The ideas being demand is low as the senior EEs stay put.

Mom and pop shops could use Excel and did successfully for years. Big banks even ran on gigabyte sized Excel sheets before the 2010s hype bubble (Source: direct experience working in fintech 2010-2015)

Anyone in tech believing the last 10-15 years was about anything but the US government juicing its economy to stay relevant, titillate, and ingratiate itself on now 30-40 something college grads is fooling themselves. All those students are now bought in to keeping the dollar alive.

Software has gotten so over thought and bloated given a “too many cooks in the kitchen.” situation. Templating a git repo with appropriate dep files given mathematical constraints is not rocket science. The past needed to imagine software as out of this world to gain mindshare. Correct and stable electrical state is what really matters.

We are entering a new era of tearing down the cloud monolith for open ML libs that put machines to work, not people.

Behavioral economics has been running the US since before Reagan.