Comment by austin-cheney
Comment by austin-cheney 3 hours ago
It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.
Hmm, I agree and disagree. Seniors were expected to take more responsibility, but they worked on smaller code bases. I agree the demansa have changed to meet the codebase and scale, though.
As an example, I'm sure the first Unreal Engine was made by a crew in their garage, in times where they were trailblazing techniques we take for granted 30 years later. That isn't something most modern seniors could do, but the engine could also reasonably be contained in one or two minds in its entirety.
But by UE5 you have teams that maintain every module of the engine. Millions upon millions of lines of code, hundreds of modules, dozens of features per module. It's a completely different beast. No one maintain all of that by themselves.
Maybe thars a part of what makes me want to go indie as an end goal. I want some semblance of the kinds of "responsibility" that involves a full product to ship, not just a portion of a module to maintain. Something somewhat close to what "old seniors" would do (even if I'm not coding every line of the engine like they would do).