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

[Doggy Styles]

I first programmed in BASIC.
A few 'proper' languages later, I now program in BASIC (well, VBA).

Not that I need to do much programming in my job.

[tarbera]

Testing - back in the day, our code seemed to work with no defects.

Now testing and defect fixing is a whole industry !!!

[SimonMac]

Testing - back in the day, our code seemed to work with no defects.

Now testing and defect fixing is a whole industry !!!

Maybe that means you're not as good as you used to be!

[centurian]

Google

Back in the good old days, we had to trawl through MSDN (or other providers) documentation

[SussexSeagull]

Since I started in 98:

Mainframe - PC Based - Web/Browser based - Mobile. Not sure where it can go now as wearable tech looks a bit niche to me.

Outsourcing (which has seemed to lead to offshoring in most cases) - IT has slowly moved from being an asset to a do as cheap as possible cost. Personally I don't think the industry ever recovered from Y2K where business spent a fortune with little return (which was admittedly mainly driven by government not the industry).

The rise of the manager - Power has moved from the techy to the project/process/scrum (etc.) manager. Linked into the rise of extroverts over introverts but that is another thread on it's own.

Agile and other flavour of the month methodologies - Linked to the above. Project managers the world over justifying their existence by badly implementing a new methodology. Rarely done properly and next to never improves quality or speed of delivery.

Death of IT as a career in this country - The UK government seems happy to develop Indian IT talent rather than it's own, unless they fancy working themselves towards an early heart attach working for Accenture.

[Sysman]

Testing - back in the day, our code seemed to work with no defects.

Now testing and defect fixing is a whole industry !!!

I would have got the sack if I'd either produced software which falls to load components as regularly as Windows Server Manager does with its Snap-ins or let it through testing.

[Sysman]

Google

Back in the good old days, we had to trawl through MSDN (or other providers) documentation

On the other side of the coin the DEC documentation was excellent.

You could write whole systems without an internet connection.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Testing - back in the day, our code seemed to work with no defects.

Now testing and defect fixing is a whole industry !!!

Thats because back in the day systems were much smaller and less complicated.

[malvolio]

Thats because back in the day systems were much smaller and less complicated.

You think?

I once coded something that out-guessed the old Milk Marketing Board's costing systems, so farmers could maximise their income vs feed costs as one element of a system that handled 2000 production sets across 15 factories, on a three node VAX cluster in 1982. And I ran a 100% available service for a semiconductor plant that ran four years with no downtime (until BT JCB'd the main power for the estate... ).

And bear in mind we were coding against limitations like 32K address registers and <1 Mips CPU power: I wrote a leap year calculator subroutine that didn't use divide (or the number 4, come to that) to save about two dozen machine code instructions and some memory. Don't confuse size with complexity.

[EternalOptimist]

Being connected is the biggest change. no doubt

working from home 20 years ago would have been impossible, now it's not only easy, but its adding about 80 quid a day to my bottom line.

and thats a lot of bottom line. So with that one change , we are talking IT Change, business change and social change. thats big