The internet is a series of tubes meme aside, I've felt that a lot of modern engineering, at least tying together REST APIs with web/mobile GUIs to do CRUD, is really just data plumbing. We're just packaging and unpacking blobs of information. That's it.

And the difficulty involved is that we're not yet smart enough to build efficient, easily-adopted systems that use natural language and don't contain a million dependencies and hacky workarounds.