I gotta call shenanigans on this. I got out of college in 1984. My starting salary in as a programmer was higher than my father's (a chemist working for the same company for 40+ years) had been when he retired 4 years earlier. And was quite well employed during that stretch from 1984 until your "late 90s" cut-off. And since.
I agree that it was mostly math folks going into CS (in fact my college didn't have an undergrad CS degree yet - you majored in math but chose a specific CS track), but the job market wasn't bad at all, let alone "sucked".
If you were in Silicon Valley?...that tracks. Same with Seattle and probably a few other major cities with then current tech stalwarts. If you lived in middle America, the jobs sucked. They paid OK, but they were constantly laying people off. It was a high stress, low-security environment. Most programmers didn't work for tech companies, they worked in industry implementing software.
Most companies looked at software as an expense and few saw it as an investment and were eager to cut it whenever they could. They knew they needed it, but they wanted to have as small of crews as possible. My sister and all her friends were constantly getting laid off. The ones who remained were perpetually insecure.
When I entered the workforce, the greybeards would also tell stories about how they were mistreated. I was smart enough to move to a better city, but even in a tech city, it definitely scarred the generation before me. In the 80s, there were many, especially in Middle America, who got jobs for major corporations writing software. They loved it and were good at it...and they were laid off within 5 years or their company closed down and recessions were more frequent then for tech workers, so they often were competing in a saturated market. Quite a few just gave up and went into teaching or something else.
When I entered the workforce, the greybeards I met?...I am confident they couldn't get work outside the industry without a LOT of fundamental changes to everything about them. Now they're generally smart, so I am sure they could pivot to real estate, teaching, or whatever your choice of backup career is if they really really really put their mind to it, but it would be anything but smooth or pretty.
The job market improved DRASTICALLY after the dot-com boom because even the biggest idiot MBAs could clearly see technology as an investment with a clear line of sight to growth and not just an expense, which probably isn't paying for itself. This led to programming being a good choice for a career and not something you suffered through because you loved it.
The 80s just had different computers and tools, not so much different programmers. Well, at least once you get past HTML.
You don't remember the 80s well. Programmers did smaller scoped work that accomplished less. It was much harder to do back then and their tools were limited. it wasn't their fault. However, it wasn't fun. Languages that managed memory, like Java...as well as easier programming languages, like JavaScript and Python attracted a lot of people who enjoyed coding. It brought in a lot of scientists and creative individuals that wrote amazing stuff. The majority of code before 1995?...those SHITTY text-based indecipherable client server apps that you saw in insurance companies, hospitals, and car dealerships. They SUCKED, did very little, and were so hard to use, you had to train EVERYONE who touched them for several days just to figure out the esoteric convoluted interface.
OK, so you didn't mind the ancient text-based client/server apps?...well they crashed often. GUIs were usually worse. Did you forget having your apps crash DAILY? Windows crashed daily and as an early Desktop Linux adopter, I can say the OS didn't crash much at all, but everything I ran outside a terminal did. So I suppose it's faster to restart Netscape than Window, but still...today? I only have 1 app that crashes often : Oracle's SQL Developer....a total piece of Larry-Ellison-grade-grift-and-garbage. Beyond that?...nope, thanks to frameworks and memory-safe languages...or just programmers getting better at their craft, crashes are very rare in my daily life. I never have to save my work often thinking my IDE or text editor or e-mail program will crash any minute.
Regarding personalities? Yeah, obviously not every programmer is socially dysfunctional in the 80s. But every one I met?...definitely so. My sister would let me visit her office when I was 12 and I thought it was the coolest thing going to a big city office for a big company. All of my sister's friends? They had cool toys, but were tough to be around and hold a conversation with, even when you thought they were super cool and I was into everything they were into. Even as a young child I met them and said to myself "I love that you have all the cool video games and electronics and a really fast car, but I can't see you ever getting a girlfriend with that massive belly, your girl arms, your ill-fitting t-shirt and gross beard that looks like it needs to be washed...and certainly your personality can't be helping."
Many were cool, I am sure, but let's be real, well over 75% would not have thrived in other industries. It would take a LOT of adjustment for them to thrive in sales or healthcare or any environment that required more interaction with people than machines.
There are many smart people in the 80s that could have been programmers, but unless they were in a few tech cities, they chose medicine, research, finance, law, or accounting for better pay and job security (layoffs were very common back then...software was seen as a nuisance overhead expense more than an investment by most outside the tech business).
I think the office is better with some diversity. Not just gender/racial, but background and thought patterns. I don't want to go back to gatekeeping and making programming for the hardcore only. I will thrive. I'm good at my job, but the people I enjoy working with the most will probably find something else less stressful/hostile.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? For quite some time, coding has been pushed as a way to make yourself marketable. For a lot of people who have no particular passion for it—nor for anything else, which is why they're dabbling in everything—but were only in it because they thought it was a good career move, it is smart to look for greener pastures now. The real question is, what adjacent fields are easy to slide into, but AREN'T equally vulnerable to the unblinking gaze of AI once there is the critical mass to justify the effort? Are there any?
Counterpoint, Until the late 90s, programming was the domain of the autistic and severely mathematically inclined. In most areas, the pay sucked, and their output sucked even more. It was a hostile environment everywhere but in the bay area and Seattle...maybe a few others. My (much) older sister was a COBOL programmer...her life sucked. She was grateful to be laid off with severance and start a career elsewhere. Hearing about her experiences made me recosinder a programming job...I was great at writing code, but didn't want to live her life. Luckily the dot com boom pulled me back in.
Would you rather have the software of today or the software of 1995? Let's be real, most programmers before the internet couldn't find good work outside of working with programmers. They lacked the soft skills to work anywhere, but in front of a computer, FAR away from customers.
The programmers today certainly aren't as hardcore as those in the 80s, myself included, but we make MUCH MUCH MUCH better stuff. Plus I like diverse work environments. I've even got Asperger's and my version of hell is being trapped in a room full of hardcore autistic engineers who obsess about micro-optimizations (which happens to be a passion of mine).
We don't want shitty programmers, but we also don't want to scare off creative people with options. There's a nice balance. Plus it's nice to have at least a few coworkers who aren't white or Asian. We want to hire passionate people who put a lot of love into the craft.
AI is really killing programming. It's simply not fun. You write something by hand and put love and good work into it and you feel like a dinosaur failing your manager telling you to have Claude write it all...with a sense of guilt wondering "did I take longer than Claude and waste money?"
Then I do the opposite and have Claude write something simple (which is what my bosses want us to do). Today, it was writing a unit test for some underloved code I inherited. I wrote the skeleton and 1 test by hand to show Claude how it's done and told it to replicate the pattern for the other 16 endpoints. It took nearly all day, probably cost a ton of money and the output is SHIT. I keep refining things and pointing out mistakes and it just creates this indecipherable convoluted mess. Now I'm doubting myself. I had a simple functional project...here is an input, assert the output....why is it 10,000 lines of Java? I had to go helper method by helper method and tell it to use extremely common annotations in the classpath which we use elsewhere than write it's own bullshit.
Each minor optimization like "on method fuckMeUpTheAssWithABroomSideways(), the try/catch isn't needed. Use @SneakyThrows instead"...something an IDE plugin can do in 5 seconds, takes 10 minutes on Claude Opus 5.0. It'll copy and paste it's own code to an insane degree. It's SOOOO stupid that it makes me doubt my sanity and eyesight. Surely Claude isn't STUPID enough to copy/paste a boilerplate function into 5 classes within 1 single session?!?!....These 5 methods must be different somehow. "I" must be wrong because there's no way an AI can be THIS stupid..... Nope, I was right, so I told Claude to stop it....another 15 minutes to change 1 method to public, delete the 4 copy/paste and statically import the new remaining method 4x.
So the final product is of poor quality, took longer than it would have taken me to write it myself, and I feel ashamed to release it. But my boss is happy with me and thinks I did the right thing.
AI certainly hasn't made my life better. I can't recommend this career path as enthusiastically as I used to. When people ask me today, I tell them. "I really have no clue if your kid should become a programmer today. He/she needs to figure this out on their own. " But regardless, it would be nice to have coworkers who were talented enough to choose software development over other options...not just the duds who couldn't make it anywhere where human interaction was required.
Eisenhower sent 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce integration with weapons in hand in case they took fire. He also Federalized the Arkansas National Guard.
One segregationist got butt stroked in the face for trying to grab a rifle and another got a bayonet wound to the arm. Eisenhower knew his military options precisely (note his WWII command record). While his orders to deploy were legal, "firing on citizens" was of course an option and may well be used illegally though we're not quite in Weimar mode yet.
I always figured that people who genuinely believed their employers were likely to kill literally everybody in the near future might burn down a bit more than that, but so far it's mostly been tweets
To be fair sand is rough on floppy drives.
System checkpoint complete.
