[bunderbunder]

I think it depends on how “before” we’re talking about.

I can remember a time when learning was valued and leaving the camp cleaner than you found it was considered a basic professional standard.

But I can also remember a time when Scrum became all the rage and next thing you know we’re all stuck on the sprinting treadmill, management is obsessing over “velocity”, and it’s generally an everyone-for-themself free-for-all to clear the absolute minimum criteria to get the ticket moved to the “done” column in a semi-desperate effort to keep up with your ever-growing backlog of tickets to which you’ve been over committed. Don’t worry about incomprehensible code or flaky designs; taking your time to do it right the first time looks bad on the KPI dashboard but rework does the opposite because you get to count the second (third, fourth, etc.) times the same task needs to be revisited towards your velocity metrics, too.

I’m not sure most developers younger than maybe 40 realize just how much worse our line of work has become over the past ~15 years.