> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.
I'm pretty sure the way I was doing things in 2005 was completely different compared to 2015. Same for 2015 and 2025. I'm not old enough to know how they were doing things in 1995, but I'm pretty sure there very different compared to 2005.
For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".
I also wonder what those people have been doing all this time... I also have been mostly working as a developer for about 20 years and I don't think much has changed at all.
I also don't feel less productive or lacking in anything compared to the newer developers I know (including some LLM users) so I don't think I am obsolete either.
At some point I could straight-up call functions from the Visual Studio debugger Watch window instead of editing and recompiling. That was pretty sick.
Yes I know, Lisp could do this the whole time. Feel free to offer me a Lisp job drive-by Lisp person.
Isn’t there a whole ton of memes about the increase in complexity and full stack everything and having to take in devops, like nothing has changed at all?
I don't think that's true, at least for everywhere I've worked.
Agile has completely changed things, for better or for worse.
Being a SWE today is nothing like 30 years ago, for me. I much preferred the earlier days as well, as it felt far more engineered and considered as opposed to much of the MVP 'productivity' of today.
MVP is not necessarily opposed to engineered and considered. It's just that many people who throw that term around have little regard for engineering, which they hide behind buzzwords like "agile".
Yeah, I remember being amazed at the immediate incremental compilation on save in Visual Age for Java many years ago. Today's neovim users have features that even the most advanced IDEs didn't have back then.
I think a lot of people in the industry forget just how much change has come from 30 years of incremental progress.
1995 vs 2005 was definitely a larger change than subsequent decades; in 1995 most information was gathered through dead trees or reverse engineering.
I don't think things have changed that much in the time I've been doing it (roughly 20 years). Tools have evolved and new things were added but the core workflow of a developer has more or less stayed the same.