I'd argue that the engineers of 20 years ago were better than the engineers of today because they were significantly more resource constrained and for example, would never use a 300mb javascript library for a profile page.
John Carmack did praise restraint of resources when he recalled his early days working as a lone contractor and as an employee of Softdisk, when he and the team had to push out games on a very tight schedule.
I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.
As a percentage of good to mediocre, maybe.
Engineers of 40 years ago were probably better than engineers 20 years ago. Less of them and more constraints they had to deal with.
Democratization of technology makes it easier for more people to use. It applies to programming as much as just using a computer.
I never buy these examples. Being a good engineer is more than purely resource optimization. I can think of many times over my career where resource optimization mattered but it’s not always a valuable undertaking.
You're missing a step in the middle: It's not resource optimization itself, it's working under the constraint that forces you to learn, get creative, and figure things out. The investigation, attempts, failures, detours - all of it teaches you more about the language and system you're working on. That's where the experience and improved skills comes from.
Referring to it just by the end result of "resource optimization" is overly simplistic, along the lines of "painting is no big deal, it's just a bunch of colors".
Why do folks like yourself jump to such dull and cheap comments.
> “Painting is no big deal, it’s just a bunch of colors”
I don’t think anyone was saying such a thing. The original post stated that engineers of yesterday were so much better because of resource use, nobody would install a large JavaScript library.
My counter is that I don’t believe these arguments ever truly hold up. The times change and engineers are just as good as they once were but in other attributes. Sure constraints are great in work and in the market but that was not the original thesis.
20 years ago we were complaining about steam being bloated and unnecessary, we were 6 months off vista being a bloated mess and the Office Ribbon debacle being in full swing. PC games were often half baked console ports with atrocious performance and filled with game breaking bugs. Software was super rigid - there was no real cross platform support. We were just heading into the core 2 duo realm and it was a mess.
I think this extends to other parts of life, too. I still remember that I fondly played a game over and over again back in high school, when I did not have the Internet and had to borrow CDs from my friends — but when I went into the university and had access to pretty much every game freely on the Intranet, I rarely do that anymore. That’s why I always think an abundance of X may not be the best option for me. That’s why probably includes money, too.