I really like the way you've put it "Glue a few X together".
This is what most software development is becoming. We are no longer building software, we are gluing/integrating prebuild software components or using services.
You no longer solve fundamental problems unless you have a very special use case or for fun. You mostly have to figure out how to solve higher level problems using off-the-shelf components. It's both good and bad if you ask me (depends at what part of the glass you're looking at).
I also would have loved discovering electricity or information theory. Somehow it's convenient that people stacked on the shoulders of each other across a few generations made processors from that but it sadly put the bar pretty high to go further nowadays.
Thankfully I can use these cool processors to build the next CandyCrush and shine in our modern and innovative society.
This is something that I can’t show numbers for but it seems likely that the absolute number of jobs of people who do “build software” has likely increased with time, it’s just that the number of “glueing frameworks” jobs have increased by a lot more so you’re probably just in the wrong category. It seems difficult to think that there aren’t thousands of network engineers keeping the internet backbone humming along.
This is what most software development is becoming. We are no longer building software, we are gluing/integrating prebuild software components or using services.
You no longer solve fundamental problems unless you have a very special use case or for fun. You mostly have to figure out how to solve higher level problems using off-the-shelf components. It's both good and bad if you ask me (depends at what part of the glass you're looking at).