I'm still heavily involved in IT. I know the game has changed. As well as the complexity that's come in to it, there's an awful lot of complexity that's disappeared. Those necessary middle-tier components and UI frameworks have to be used, but they no longer have to be built from scratch.
>We also didn't worry about clustered environments, asynchronicity, or concurrency.
Clustered environments, probably not. But asynchronicity and concurrency were the bane of my life. Writing comms software back in the day involved having to hand-craft both the interrupt-driven reading of data from the i/o port and the storage and tracking of that data in a memory-constrained queue, synchronised with displaying that data on the screen. And the windowed UI had to be hand-crafted as well. Error handling was no more of an afterthought then than it is now - and you couldn't roll out a patch for a minor defect without manually copying 500 floppy disks and posting them to clients.
I understand why some bits of development take a long time, but the reality is that 90+% of the development work that our place does these days is what an ex-manager used to refer to as "bricklaying" - dull and repetitive work that involves pretty much zero thought to implement. Extract file X (using the language's built in drag and drop file-extract wizard), sort it by date (using the language's built-in sort module), split into two separate files (using the language's built-in file split module) and load into database Y (using the language's built-in database load module).
And even with all of these tools, it still takes 10 times longer for people to develop these kinds of thing than it did when we were writing all of this from scratch. It's not because of complexity of coding, of environments, or of frameworks. The problem is that much of the IT industry has replaced skill and knowledge with process, contracts, documentation and disinterested cheap labour.
>We also didn't worry about clustered environments, asynchronicity, or concurrency.
Clustered environments, probably not. But asynchronicity and concurrency were the bane of my life. Writing comms software back in the day involved having to hand-craft both the interrupt-driven reading of data from the i/o port and the storage and tracking of that data in a memory-constrained queue, synchronised with displaying that data on the screen. And the windowed UI had to be hand-crafted as well. Error handling was no more of an afterthought then than it is now - and you couldn't roll out a patch for a minor defect without manually copying 500 floppy disks and posting them to clients.
I understand why some bits of development take a long time, but the reality is that 90+% of the development work that our place does these days is what an ex-manager used to refer to as "bricklaying" - dull and repetitive work that involves pretty much zero thought to implement. Extract file X (using the language's built in drag and drop file-extract wizard), sort it by date (using the language's built-in sort module), split into two separate files (using the language's built-in file split module) and load into database Y (using the language's built-in database load module).
And even with all of these tools, it still takes 10 times longer for people to develop these kinds of thing than it did when we were writing all of this from scratch. It's not because of complexity of coding, of environments, or of frameworks. The problem is that much of the IT industry has replaced skill and knowledge with process, contracts, documentation and disinterested cheap labour.