[twelfthnight]

If there ever used to be "Senior Engineers", I wonder if it was because before there were so many fewer engineers and those who were engineers were the folks who were most interested in computers. Nowadays the field is lucrative and people do it for money, so the average dev is lower quality. Kind of like an eternal September situation.

[screwturner68]

I think you are on to something. When I started coding in 1980 you really had to figure things out and what you coded was your code, you wrote every bit of it. Why, because we didn't have Stackoverflow, Github or Google to help us out t best we had a friend who also liked to code and they might help you but it was still all you. Now coding seems a lot more like cutting and pasting of someone else's code and making it work for you, so much of the heavy lifting has been done by someone els, the equivalent of knowing how to drive vs knowing how to build the car that you are driving. As you said now being a programmer is where the money is, I can assure you that making big dollars was on nobodies mind in the '80's. If anything being a programmer back then was anti-social, something that people would make fun of you over not something that was praised now every unemployed idiot is encouraged to "learn to program". You did it because it was something that interested you, you enjoyed it and to be quiet frank unless you wanted to be a Cobal or PL1 programmer there weren't a lot of jobs out there certainly not for the PC.

So you've gone from a group of people that got into programming because it peaked their interest and their hobby became their occupation to a group of people who look at programming as a way to make a lot of money. I'm not saying these people aren't talented and don't enjoy what they do I just think they are coming from a different angle than us grey beards. I also think the real problem is figuring something out on your own is no longer a thing, if there's a problem you go straight to google for the answer and while efficient it screws with the learning process and it reduces new and novel ideas.