What is the biggest change to working in IT since you started your career?

[DimPrawn]

Bobs and low pay.

In the 1990's I earned enough in one year to buy a 4 bed house outright. Most IT contractors were driving Porsches as std.

Now they post on here about struggling to get a mortgage and which 12 year old Ford is the best.

[vwdan]

Bobs and low pay.

In the 1990's I earned enough in one year to buy a 4 bed house outright. Most IT contractors were driving Porsches as std.

Now they post on here about struggling to get a mortgage and which 12 year old Ford is the best.

Part of this is a dilution of talent and an influx of people to the arena, I guess. I'm still relatively new to the IT industry with around about 10 years in. However, throughout all of primary school and a little bit of secondary school I was the only person in our class to have a PC, let alone internet access! IT was seen as something bordering on witchcraft and out of reach for the non-geek.

Nowadays every man and their dog thinks they can make a killer app and be the next Facebook or whatever. I think those of us who are good will continue to sail well above the market average, and certainly stick to the "Senior Professional" Salary ranges, but it's no surprise that there has been a period of normalisation and increased competition.

[TraceRacing]

The arrival and subsequent demise of the green screen... back in the 70's it was coding sheets, dry testing and punched cards...then came the green screen and released us from the tedium and we were even allowed 2 compile attempts before being hauled up in front of management for a bollocking...

Then they disappeared with the advent of that new shiny PC... and then Windoze 3.1....

[darmstadt]

The arrival and subsequent demise of the green screen... back in the 70's it was coding sheets, dry testing and punched cards...then came the green screen and released us from the tedium and we were even allowed 2 compile attempts before being hauled up in front of management for a bollocking...

Then they disappeared with the advent of that new shiny PC... and then Windoze 3.1....

Hmmm, I'm sitting in front of a green (*) screen now, actually 4 of them thanks to the PC otherwise I would need a bloody big desk (and I can remember doing that!)

(* actually my green screen does now allow 7 colours!)

[darrylmg]

Hmmm, I'm sitting in front of a green (*) screen now, actually 4 of them thanks to the PC otherwise I would need a bloody big desk (and I can remember doing that!)

(* actually my green screen does now allow 7 colours!)

Good point.
Desk sizes are smaller, chairs more complicated and people slightly fatter.

[lilelvis2000]

Easy. the somewhat mistaken notion that thinking long a hard about design first is a waste of time. That people (customers/clients) believe that everything is a 2 day job and that testing can be done 'later' - "let's just get this out there and we'll fix it once it's running". Release schedules have gone from years to weeks.

Hence why I have to deal with copy-and-pasted code, forcing a change not just in one place but in dozens. Inheritance, what's that? Module, who needs that?

Mind you I have been working last 10 years as a freelancer on very small teams (2-3max) I've not been on a large team of hundreds in over 15 years. So I'm kinda seeing the leaner side of software development.

There is that measure of software development process which I think is on a scale from 0 - 4 (I think). I reckon that most places I am working for recently are at or near zero.

[darmstadt]

All shades of green?

Very much so. There's a Whiter Shade of Green, Do Blue Men Sing The Greens, Pinky and Greeny, The Yellow Green Grass of Home, Green Empathy Sailing in Turquoise, Green Green but I'm not too enamored with the Red version:

[lilelvis2000]

Bobs and low pay.

In the 1990's I earned enough in one year to buy a 4 bed house outright. Most IT contractors were driving Porsches as std.

Now they post on here about struggling to get a mortgage and which 12 year old Ford is the best.

I dream of getting a 12 y/o Ford. My car right now is a 20 year old toyota which leaks more oil than I put into it.

[woohoo]

Biggest change has to be the groupies.

[CoolCat]

I used to control 3 large factories, their orders, their supply chain, production within them, the staff, the scheduling, warehousing, and so on with a single live machine with 28 K of memory. CORAL 66 was the language, and it worked! One of the most successful of its type that organisation, which expanded, made lots of money, and so on.
What has changed since then?
1 Lots more BS, the world is infested with people who spend their life at conferences and BS about the latest buzz words but don’t understand the basics. Cloud, SOA, bla de bla de blommin bla.
2 Much worse leadership of the IT business. When I started I worked in a large software house where every single main board director had started out as a programmer, FD, HR, the lot. Nowadays the equivalents are mostly over promoted salespeople, people who have made their name offshoring, and so on. The numbers of main board directors who have actually coded for a living at some point, in our main IT services organisations, is less than I can count on one hand I am sure.
3 BS merchants at senior levels within the business, largely as a result of 2 above lots of political animals now infest our large organisations as senior IT folk with little or no clue. Some given professorships of universities, as a "link to industry".
4 "Tech City" and its hilarious political BS merchants, who imagine they are the centre of something. A centre of a total and utter waste of public money mostly.
5 Good respected old days IT leaders who dont realise how much things have changed. Made VC's of uni's, high ups in BCS, and so on. Without an understanding of the massive changes brought about by Indian outsourcing, and mass issue of work visas and British passports to Indian nationals, etc.
6 Far more public school fodder in the upper echelons of the IT business. Like poo they rise to the top for some reason. In the old days it was much more of a meritocracy.
7 But far and away the biggest change is the massive numbers of Indian nationals in the country working in IT, decimating the local workforce, stealing our IP, getting taxed less than us, bringing corruption and racism with them, and far too many (and their families) being given indefinite leave and British citizenship. Now so bad that some are even senior main board directors of large IT services companies.