Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort.

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.

I remember when people paid (a lot of) money for a good compiler / tooling setup.

I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.

You are spot on. People are confusing programming with money

That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.

I'd have said the Golden Age started about the time Linux distros allowed you replicate the full Unix workstation experience on a basic PC - which I think in my case was around '93 or '94 - right around the same time as the Web starting to become a standard technology.

This was my experience, too. During that period there were free tools and accessible information for learning, search was useful and the excitement was about making things. Not products to sell, interesting software to use. Then it all got paved over into a shopping mall. Those tools and information are still around. (If you look hard enough past the edges of the shopping mall.) I just spent my morning before work once again working on free software, but the mainstream culture of programming is depressing to me now.

Of all the impressive software developers I had pleasure to meet before 2012, I never met one who did it for money. They loved their work, the craft, the science, and sheer joy of the creative process. That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.

The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:

* 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.

People figured out that their passion was being exploited by some very rich and greedy people for obscene amounts of money.

If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.

> That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.

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.

If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend.

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.

Open source really flourished due to lots of sponsoring of projects, I could see an argument that money caused a golden age in 2010s, but money also attracted the type of person who could, without irony, say "It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort."

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Agreed, and importantly the increasing availabilty of open source compilers/interpreters that made it possible for the broke kid to sling real code.

I think it was the rise of SaaS and major-scale big tech. That was also the point where structure sucked a lot of the fun out of it by converting SWEs into code factory workers by removing most of the forms of artistic expression from it (yes SWEs aren't always the best UI designers or product managers or program managers, but I think it was a mistake to remove them entirely from the equation. Regardless whether it was a mistake, it really sucked the joy out of it for many people, myself included).

That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).

> Unless you're on Linux

Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?

I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.

Because my industry experience has been exactly that. It's importing stuff and puzzling packages together. There really isn't a lot of jobs where you actually have to implement interesting algorithms yourself.

It wasn’t just programming either. It was anything with computing. I remember when you could walk into a book store and find a wall of books on Linux, so many of which came with “the Publisher’s Edition” of a Linux distro. That’s how I learned (and obtained!) Linux for the first time. I was hooked.

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.

> Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?

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

I was genuinely excited as a 16 year old, poor kid when I first bought my Borland Turbo C suite/compiler. That was my golden age of programming.