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Comment by awesan

16 hours ago

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.

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".

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?