Is software engineering slowly getting automated?

Question

There are certain fields in software engineering that, at least to me, appear to be getting automated away--or at least have become less important for most companies to worry about. Take cloud computing engineering for example. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have abstracted away a lot of the challenges in cloud computing, making it less important for companies to hire engineers in this area. The same goes for really any PaaS; many ML services have greatly reduced the demand for ML-exclusive engineers at companies, especially non-technical ones. There are even higher-level services such as Firebase that make backend development obsolete for many cases. What are your thoughts on this?

nipuna777 · Accepted Answer

I see it as the boring parts of software engineering being automated away. The essence of software engineering remains relatively unchanged.
Cloud engineering is still important, but instead of worrying about keeping the OS updated, you can worry about creating policies for scaling up/down instances. This means you get to work on more interesting problems rather than the implementation details.
Until there are tools that can automate the human aspect of software engineering(understanding requirements and managing change), I don't think software engineering will be automated.