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Older Computer Programmers & Engineers (lemm.ee)

submitted 8 months ago by gronjo45@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It's fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I'm curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 11 points 8 months ago (7 children)

I did a computer science degree in the equivalent of a community college then followed with software engineering in an engineering university. Graduated in 2008.

I find that software development and IT in general was a lot simpler back then than today. Nobody required any kind of certification to get a job.

Early 2000s, when you had a problem in your project, you really had to mess around and try things to find the solution. You couldn't really so much on stackoverflow or similar sites.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 7 points 8 months ago

I'm around the same time. At my first job I had a stack of reference books for the languages and technologies I use.

I would actually argue things are simpler now based purely on the fact that there is such a big ecosystem of libraries and services available that you don't need to write everything yourself.

It's true it can be hard to find what you want but I've found LLMs (at least ones that search the internet like copilot) are really good at pointing you to existing options.

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