>>26
It's a societal problem that also affects programming. Having worked for large banks and the government for a few years I've come to the conclusion that the majority of office workers in general are not useful. I worked in a processing center for a large bank, and the majority of those jobs could be automated fairly easily. Not "pie in the sky" deep-learning AI neural-nets running on $4MM worth of GPUs, but fairly simple algorithms could make thousands of jobs redundant in this organization. I suspect it's not ignorance or stupidity on management's part in keeping those jobs around, but is done because "job creation" is seen as so important to the economy, so government grants, social status of executives and the tone of media coverage etc are largely derived from employee headcount.
I think this syndrome of rent-seeking will continue until society at-large understands that a large amount of jobs have already been made redundant by technology.