It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
replies(4):
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.
The learn to code movement, the plethora of bootcamps promising to make you "job ready", and how it became more widespread knowledge that software development was a "quick" way to a 6 figure+ salary. It's around that time it spread beyond just the nerds and became the hot new easy money career, or at least people thought at the time.
2008 played a role as well. People saw that tech was relatively resilient, and one of the only industries accelerating after the crisis. After 2008, chosen majors at universities saw a drastic change as well from humanities and arts into more job-focused degrees, CS being the major one.
Still happening today, although the job market isn't what it used to be, tech is still one of the very few fields where someone can quickly earn 6+ figures without a PhD.
Honestly if salaries would have kept up in other fields, we probably would not have seen as many people rushing to software development as a safe haven from economic instability.
There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.
If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
Where else was a kid going to get a full Linux suite (with just a dial up connection) and a sound basic education for it, in 2003?
I never quite took that for granted, but I still miss being able to walk into a bookstore and walk out with a book with software included. There was something really special about that.
I totally agree, but most people I know (myself included) initially got started on different systems (Windows in my case). If I'd had to learn Linux at the same time, it may have been too steep a learning curve