[enjo]

Just jumping in to agree here. I've always thought of this way:

In the 90's the code I wrote was more difficult. Today coding is much easier (better languages, tooling, etc..). However the systems I build are many times more complex.

In the 90's we hired the best programmers, today we hire the people who are best at managing ambiguity and complexity.

All of this is very hand-wavy as there are certainly still disciplines where pure programming skill is most important, but those seem to be fewer and fewer every day.