[ralphc]

I recently gave a software engineering talk at a high school's career day, and a student asked how the industry has changed, and it caused me to think about this. In a lot of ways I think it's a wash. We could do less with the tools back then but we were expected to do less. In the 80's we had Borland C++ or VC++ to write our text-based screens and BTrieve-based databases on the same machine. The tools have expanded considerably but we're expected to spin up databases, code for them, handle multi-user, multithreaded (or async) coding, GUIs or mobile web-based UIs, use different languages for each part of the puzzle.