You don’t see the point, it is much harder to keep up with technology and the requirements are so much more intense than 30 years ago. The value added has increased but the salaries have not. this should please you though, being the great humanitarian that you are. Squeeze then until the turn white and bleed out....
We didn’t have PCs, google or internet. We had slide rules, mainframes (complete with card decks of fortran) and CRC manuals. Nothing was at your fingertips, and if you didn’t have the concept AND the data down pat, you were SOL. I wish I was in engineering school these days!
OTOH, I doubled in petro and CS, so when the collapse of exploration happened at the end of the embargo, I still had programming to fall back on, and never looked back. We hire java programmers out of college in the $60’s, with bennies. Dunno about the oil patch these days though...