Ask HN: What has changed for developers in the last 20 years

Software development has been turned into a ridiculous contest rather than a job or profession. Twenty years ago you would go to college, work on some projects, meet with some companies in your town and get a job and maybe work on fighter jets or banking software. Now you go to a three week web dev boot camp, read cracking the code interview books, compete with hundreds of other people from around the world to solve a math/programming riddle/problem for the chance to make $150k/yr.

It's not about the work or profession any more. It's about people trying to optimize the shortest path to $150k/yr and has a certain game show feel to the industry. No one has any idea what they would be doing at the job. Many places don't even put you on a team immediately, and there is a sense that nothing else matters in the workplace/contest other than those skills used to 'crack' the interview. Degrees don't matter, and there's no industry or work to be done outside of web or mobile app development either.

Imagine today if mechanical engineering was solely focused on not designing, but making specific types of flanges. People would go to a flange boot camp then read 'cracking the flange making interview.' They would interview where they would sit at a lathe and make an honest-to-god flange. If it were a good flange you'd get a call back and a $100k salary with 50k in stock over three years to make flanges. You'd start making flanges on Monday. One day you ask yourself "why are we making flanges again? Aren't machinists supposed to be making the parts? Why are we not developing new CFD techniques or new packages for structural stress analysis?" Oh yeah, venture capital is only funding flange making.

For databases: I remember all the "create dynamic websites with PHP and MySQL" tutorials around 2000. Prior to that, on the low-end (being a high schooler with no money), my applications used flat file databases.

> Real Media was satan.

I remember Real Player wanting $2,000+ per server license to be able to stream content. It was a perk in different hosting accounts, some featured the ability to stream.

My memory is hazy, but didn't VB not come out until the mid/late 90s? That was the era when "build it all yourself" began to die... Other systems from that vintage included COM, DHTML, Java, MFC, GNOME, KDE, wxwidgets, etc.

VB6 was at probably peak popularity mid/late 90s which is why you probably remember it as just coming out even though it had been out for a while. That's one thing that's certainly different - the rate of growth and hype for new languages and technologies. The literal and figurative network effects today obviously allow stuff the ability to get hot so much faster.

The big changes are in the frameworks/libraries, collaboration tools, information availability and pure computational power. All the other stuff is the same really. Agile and waterfall are still being used, client, mobile and web are still used, mainframe too.

From my perspective it is the collaboration and depth of answers you can find online now. When I was programming 20 years ago I was in college and "the web" really didn't exist - there was email and networks, etc. but web browsing hadn't really begun mainstream yet. When I needed to learn something I had to find a book on it or actually attend a class - like programming EJB's in J2EE.

An example about frameworks/libraries: building web applications was very different since you had Netscape and IE (v4) supporting different and overlapping HTML, CSS and JS features. MVC and all the frameworks out now were really in their infancy or didn't exist 20 years ago. I was doing CGI scripts with Perl for some apps and there was a lot of heavy lifting compared to today.

Today you can probably have a scaffold/basic application (thinking in Rails) that is OS and device independent with something like bootstrap, running on a VM, on the internet in about a hour. So it's much quicker to get to the point where you start adding value rather then spending enormous amounts of time on basic infrastructure.