I'm right about this milestone as well. I started programming circa 1980
(BASIC on a Sinclair ZX81). I'm not coding as much as I used to or want to these days...
A lot has changed in terms of technology but has it really. The industry has changed though. I don't know if this is just my narrow perspective but it seems the % of challenging/interesting work is much smaller than it used to be.
% is certainly much smaller: computers are so cheap these days that it makes sense to pay people to do boring stuff with them.
However: in absolute terms, I bet there's way more challenging/interesting work now than 40 years ago, and in geographical terms, there are definitely way more places it's possible to do that work.
Food for thought:
> I suppose the picture of computing is of a topsy-turvy growth obeying laws of a commercial "natural" selection. This could be entirely accurate considering how fast it has grown. Things started out in a scholarly vein, but the rush of commerce hasn't allowed much time to think where we're going.
You also know a lot more, so finding challenging problems is harder. When first starting everything is new and challenging. Eventually you start to see the same patterns over and over.
What’s kept me interested over many years is to expand my problem space. Business problems, people problems, devops problems, architecture problems, etc... There are tons of problems to solve, just not all them require code (unfortunately).
A lot has changed in terms of technology but has it really. The industry has changed though. I don't know if this is just my narrow perspective but it seems the % of challenging/interesting work is much smaller than it used to be.