When I think back on several decades in the software industry – first as a programmer, now in software marketing – I have a lot of respect for people who have been able to stay in an IT career. Industry changes have been so dramatic that in many ways a developer career is completely different than it used to be.
Perhaps the most obvious thing is that software development is a somewhat more “sexy” career than in the past. We have seen the emergence of enormous organizations that are built on software, and some very famous and iconic developers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Today, developers write blogs and tweet about their projects, or cultivate a presence as an authority on sites like Stack Overflow. This is far removed from my generation’s experience, where a developer might have been important within their organization, but it was assumed that no one outside of the org had any interest in what they were doing. Few people were thinking of creating their own companies, either, since there was no such thing as a world-wide internet.
At that time (the mid-1980’s) much of the software a company ran was built in-house, even for some very low-level things like communications and transaction processing. Corporations purchased and installed an enterprise line of business packages to run their accounting departments and the like, but everything else was custom coded.
IT departments were siloed. There was not a lot of common knowledge to share across organizations, and no way, or course, to google an answer. In fact, where I worked, in New York City, there was only one bookstore dedicated to computer subjects.
As a result, you had to lean pretty heavily on internal experts. That could require a bit of diplomacy, as truly knowledgeable coworkers could end up with what I guess you could call “answer fatigue.” My solution when dealing with one very technical manager was to create my own script, a sort of internal currency. I would turn in one piece any time I had to ask him a question. It was a lighthearted way to get his attention, and its subtext was that there was a hard limit to the number of questions I could ask of him.
Even if they have Stack Overflow, I don’t think developers have it any easier today. The technology snowball continues to speed down the slope, gathering up more and more applications, and there’s no end in sight. There are more tools, but at the same time, more layers of software in an application, and it’s impossible to become an expert in all of them.
Of course, I doubt that the developers of today would want to go back to working in the simpler stack of yesterday. We’ve gotten too used to relying on GUIs, so that using a command line is considered a bother. I’ve written before about how developers used to have to keep cheat sheets of things like PF key assignments back then. Even worse was trying to debug problems without any real debugging software. That could mean working from a two inch thick data dump listing, or staring at a screen of hexadecimal notation, trying to calculate displacements from system registers.
I’m optimistic that in the future, the problems that cause developers grief today will ultimately be resolved by new solutions, perhaps more self-diagnosis and self-repair by systems. But even as their job descriptions and their technologies evolve, one unchanging factor will be the need for bright and dedicated developers to keep it all running.
