[tchaffee]

I've been coding for at least two decades, and possibly a lot longer if I want to stay vague about my age. It's definitely not getting worse imo. First, a CS education is nice to have but being a great engineer and having a degree aren't highly correlated. What makes a great engineer is someone who loves programming, and someone who builds lots of things. You learn by doing. You cannot stop people like that from learning and improving.

There are certainly far more programmers every passing year. Does someone need to be a highly trained engineer to build a small marketing website? Likely no. Is it a bad thing for our industry to have such a high demand for programmers with varying degrees of ability and training? I don't think so. What I envision instead is a future where basic programming is like driving a car. Lots of people will know how to do it.

I follow many great engineers and can even look at their code and learn from them. They are building things the best of us thought would be impossible a couple of decades ago. It's a super easy choice: if I could choose to go back to any point in time in the history of software engineering in order to experience the highest levels of quality, I would choose to be here, now.