I started my career in the early nineties. It's different now. Not sure if worse or better. Different.
What I enjoyed about the 90's is that there was still plenty of meaningful work implementing published algorithms. I remember for example, coding Delaunay triangulation, our own Quartenions etc in C++. These days you just download and learn an API to do it.
What this means is now you can build comparable stuff much quicker. It's all been implemented and you're mostly gluing libraries.
Gluing stuff is a lot less fun than doing it from scratch and you learn much less but it's the only way to stay competitive.
If you want to build something rapidly to show off though, today it's much easier.
Web development seems to suck more with every year passing. I wasn't all that into it in the 90's as it was very nascent and primarily for text and images due to bandwidth limitations. But VRML was mighty impressive if you used it on a LAN.
Web devs seem to reinvent wheels more than other types of devs. Everything is hailed as a breakthrough in productivity that subsequently fails to materialize. They impress each other with how concise the framework du-jour makes the code, forgetting that troubleshooting ease is much more important.
Troublueshooting stuff was much easier in the 90's even with the simple tools. Not many systems were distributed. It was considered craziness to build distributed software unless you really needed it and had a massive budget.
Everyone builds distributed systems now, whether they need it or not.
AI/ML is amazing today. None of this was possible in the 90's we had nothing approaching the crunching power required to produce decent results. So a lot of ML work was deemed a failure even though it's being exonerated now.
I think with the resurgence of ML the software engineering field is exciting again. Things were rather boring for the last two decades when hipsters kept reinventing mundane stuff only to go back to tried tested and true (vide resurgence of SSR or RDBMS).
Overall, I think the 90's were fun. More fun than what followed. ML/AI might make things fun again.
> Web devs seem to reinvent wheels more than other types of devs. Everything is hailed as a breakthrough in productivity that fails to materialize. They impress each other with how concise the framework du-jour makes the code, forgetting that troubleshooting ease is much more important.
I really wish more people could see this as you (and I) do.
Web development is really its own horribly sheltered community. they are driven to deliver at faster and faster paces and they can't do anything properly if they even wanted to.
What I enjoyed about the 90's is that there was still plenty of meaningful work implementing published algorithms. I remember for example, coding Delaunay triangulation, our own Quartenions etc in C++. These days you just download and learn an API to do it.
What this means is now you can build comparable stuff much quicker. It's all been implemented and you're mostly gluing libraries.
Gluing stuff is a lot less fun than doing it from scratch and you learn much less but it's the only way to stay competitive.
If you want to build something rapidly to show off though, today it's much easier.
Web development seems to suck more with every year passing. I wasn't all that into it in the 90's as it was very nascent and primarily for text and images due to bandwidth limitations. But VRML was mighty impressive if you used it on a LAN.
Web devs seem to reinvent wheels more than other types of devs. Everything is hailed as a breakthrough in productivity that subsequently fails to materialize. They impress each other with how concise the framework du-jour makes the code, forgetting that troubleshooting ease is much more important.
Troublueshooting stuff was much easier in the 90's even with the simple tools. Not many systems were distributed. It was considered craziness to build distributed software unless you really needed it and had a massive budget.
Everyone builds distributed systems now, whether they need it or not.
AI/ML is amazing today. None of this was possible in the 90's we had nothing approaching the crunching power required to produce decent results. So a lot of ML work was deemed a failure even though it's being exonerated now.
I think with the resurgence of ML the software engineering field is exciting again. Things were rather boring for the last two decades when hipsters kept reinventing mundane stuff only to go back to tried tested and true (vide resurgence of SSR or RDBMS).
Overall, I think the 90's were fun. More fun than what followed. ML/AI might make things fun again.