There are simply too many angles here:   too many things that “a programmer” (by official job-title) can be or can do.

Quite a few of the jobs are routine and expendable, and so are the people who do those jobs. But there's always work to be done... every shop has a handful of many-years-old programs that are essential to the business, that were poorly written to begin with and that constantly cause problems. And for every one of those programs there's always a “Charlie” or a “Susie” who knows how to fix them, who has been doing that for the last five or ten years, and who is content to keep on doing it until retirement.

And then, on the other hand, there are the people who literally are consultants, who are insightful to the point of brilliance, and who have project-management skills over and above their (very considerable) ability as programmers. Sometimes those people become gifted managers but usually they don't. These are the people who you want in the wheel-house of the vessel, because even if they can't quite tell you themselves how they do it, they're the ones who'll consistently keep you off the snags and the rocks. They're the ones who can not only enable you to consistently deliver the cargo to the right port at the right time... they'll be the ones to tell you what to put on board, how to arrange it, and so on. They seem to be guided by intuition, and their intuition is unerringly right.

So, which one is “the union man?”

If you find yourself judging yourself as “expendable,” then you probably are. You are also probably “content,” although some intuition nags at the back of your head telling you that you shouldn't be. (And... you shouldn't be.) Sometimes the very best thing that you can do with a “nice, safe comfortable job” is to up and quit. Life is short. There is more to life than Perl. There is more to the true worth of a man or woman, than Perl. There is more to the value that you have for your employer or your company, and for yourself, than Perl.