right now, I have a job at a hosting company, we develop ALL the internal applications.
As well for public, as for all my colleagues.
Everything is build by us, and managed by us.
If anything would break, needs an update or has a bug.
They depend on us to fix it, if something breaks, we have to fix it as fast as possible, or money will be loss.
Therefore I think developers have a high and important contribution to a lot of companies and still we are underestimated by people who only know about programs to drag and drop images to create a website.
As example;
The sister of my girlfriend was like; Oh creating a website is easy, You don't do anything...
She thought creating a website is like opening a program, drag and drop some images and edit some text would do the job.
Well, After explaining and showing off what I did, she never talked to me again...