You and me both. 20-odd years ago I went into computers because I liked technology and loved computers.
Now I dislike them both. 'Tis a shame. I'm looking forward to retirement, so I can enjoy messing with electronics again.
Biggest difference that I've seen? When I got started, you needed to understand what you were doing. The 'Why' was always important. Now - especially since I'm teaching the next generation of engineers - 'Why' doesn't matter. They just Google a problem, and slap in the first solution that they find.
Which is fine when you're talking about someone's IPad. When you're talking about the company's multimillion dollar enterprise-level SAN, however, things need to be given consideration, and handled a little differently. I have the hardest time getting these kids to see the difference between "Jane Secretary's IPhone Candy Crush App" and "Data Storage that the entire business rests upon". Those who get it generally are OK....those who don't, don't last long.
Exactly. So many of the younger guys can write some really abstract object oriented, overly complicated stuff that they pull off of CodeProject which after 3 months they don’t understand either. It is like they just refuse to write a simple data access layer without having to slow it down with 2-3 layers of model forming objects to “make the data more workable”, I find it has just the opposite effect. I also don’t get wanting to use all these newer interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, yeah they may make you implement faster but do you know what it is doing. After all it is still a C++ compiler (or some other older language) underneath.
I also have a great dislike for the offshore coder trend. Indians especially are the worst. Book smart, but have no real world applicable ability. Asians and a couple outfits out of Israel on the other hand, those guys can design and code. I have not been impressed by an eastern European stuff either.
I cannot wait to get out of it.