[boomzilla]

I think what really happens is that programmer/software engineer profession have become a lot more accessible to the mass. Back in billg days when he started programming, I would bet less than 1000 kids around the country had access to a computer. In 1986, the total number of programmers would've surely been less than 10,000 and most of them worked for MS, IBM, DEC, etc. In the current time, half of SF are software engineers and entrepreneurs :) I guess my point is there are still a lot of people who work on the hard core stuff like Linux/Windows kernels where every byte counts, or JVM/LLVM where data structures/algorithms are rewritten over and over to get a bit more performance. I would say the number of programmers who have to care about the optimizing system resources may be even more than back then, it's just that there are a lot more application developers these days.