Comment by throwaway150

Forgive me but a lot of the examples seem like strawman.

> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.

But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.

> In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.

> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.

I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.

Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!