> as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008).
i dont think, if you took someone from 15 yrs ago, and transplanted them here today, that they'd find it all that different technologically. Sure, machines are faster, slightly different, and such, but the fundamentals haven't changed. A software engineer could just as well write an app today as they had 15 yrs ago.
You'd have to go back 30 yrs, for computers (and the landscape of computing) to have been different enough, that you can't transplant a software engineer.
30 years ago (1993): Linux existed, Python existed, web existed (mosaic), DOOM (3D graphics), and even Apple Newton (mobile) existed; and C, shell, windows (GUI), spreadsheet, sql, etc were known long before that.
What exactly revolutionary happened in the last 30 years? javascript? (two weeks project)
amazon, google, facebook, netflix, iphone, instagram, tiktok -- execution is great but seems inevitable that somebody will create it. Ok, for non-IT people iphone was a game changer (the first personal computer that your grandmother can actually use).
The ability of generative AI to produce BS indistinguishable from human BS is very impressive but it remains to be seen whether it is a net positive for an average developer (the time wasted correcting it, waiting for its output can be spent understanding the problem better--the typing the code itself is a small part of a programmer who knows what they are doing).
i dont think, if you took someone from 15 yrs ago, and transplanted them here today, that they'd find it all that different technologically. Sure, machines are faster, slightly different, and such, but the fundamentals haven't changed. A software engineer could just as well write an app today as they had 15 yrs ago.
You'd have to go back 30 yrs, for computers (and the landscape of computing) to have been different enough, that you can't transplant a software engineer.