| It’s valid for his interpretation of his experiences. Companies varied tremendously. I don’t share many of his opinions and experiences, and I’ve been coding his entire career. I LOVE pair programming, for example, on the rare event that I can convince someone to do it. And “waterfall” did happen, but was mostly Fortune 500 and government contracts, and those of us not in that situation laughed at it. And I see benefits of test driven development, even if I write most of my tests after the fact. The number of meetings, in my experience, was more a function of the size of the company and the team, than the era. I suspect some of the change he blames on millennials is just Microsoft getting more bureaucratic and bloated over the years. One thing that I haven’t seen anyone commenting on is the huge shift in how software is delivered. If you take a year or two to plan for a physical release of a product, there is a lot more pressure to get things perfect the first time. If you can patch something today and go live, it’s not the same as have to send physical updates to a million customers. QA was definitely important, and, I would say, more important than today. Developers as testers is great, but by no means enough. I think testing has been shifted to users somewhat. I do think that there was more of an understanding that uninterrupted time was very important. IBM did a lot of studies on what produced productive programmers and uninterrupted time was a huge factor. But software development has changed hugely over the years. I’ve been building a project that is similar to something I built only 15 years ago, and it’s amazing to me how much easier it is. I’m spending way more time gluing components together, with the help of stack overflow, and less time on hard problems. This may have changed what the optimal strategy is. I certainly try hard to be a good programmer in today’s environment, and not waste time complaining that things were better when we carved software into stone tablets. So, I’m not going to say he’s wrong, but a lot of that was not my experience. |