[ghaff]

It's a more mature industry.

I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.

[solarmist]

My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers.

Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.

[ghaff]

Plenty of server software being developed in the early 2000s. (Though minicomputers were mostly off the scene by then.)

[swatcoder]

Pretty much.

Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc

Oh, wait... maybe not!

[solarmist]

So you’re saying that none of those roles could be cross hired in the early 2000s between any of the other roles?

That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications.

[swatcoder]

It was probably about as hard to move between those domains now as it is today. Which is to say that it's pretty hard and needs some concerted, non-trivial effort in shaping your experience and how you present it before trying to make a transition, and often either some kind of inside reference to vouch for you or an employer that was especially hard up for candidates. Or else an employer that straddle multiple domains and actively supported internal transitions.

Depending on what you could bring attention to in your prior experience and the size/needs of the new orgs you seeking to move to, certain transitions were more feasible than others, but you could easily spend decades working in mind-numbing enterprise applications while wishing for opportunities in game development or trading or whatever and never get your resume so much as looked at. (And vice versa, even, for those who dreamed to "retire" into the supposed quiet of enterprise apps or government IT or whatever)

[ghaff]

I basically agree with your edit. There was a lot more fluidity among roles and even just moving into computer roles from other engineering (and even non-engineering) fields. But that's not really what you wrote initially.

[solarmist]

Fair