The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80’s
the biggest skill back then was invention, creativity, imagination, whatever you would like to call it; unlike today there was no Google, no Stackoverflow, no open source at your fingertips, rarely even someone to email to ask for help. You were basically programming on an island, and anything you needed to figure out or solve, you had to do it yourself. Sometimes you might go to a library and search books and journals, or maybe you could ask someone at a user group or conference, or if you were lucky someone you knew was a programmer. Generally though no matter what you wanted to do it was on your shoulders to come up with it. Even if someone else in the world was solving some similar problem, you probably had no way to know about it.
What you need today is searching, understanding and evaluation. You have access to the world’s smartest (and sometimes dumbest) people. The chances that something you need hasn’t been done elsewhere is rare and the real skill is in finding it, relating it to what you need, deciding if it is useful or adaptable, and if it is of a decent quality.
.. That is a very different skill set than the 80’s programmer—working with little information, having to imagine how to fix it or invent it or solve it in some way. Back then of course there were a lot fewer programmers (guessing maybe 1% or 0.1% of today) and unless you were good at figuring things out for yourself, you really couldn’t be a programmer outside of some very large employer. Today it seems much more likely that someone without much imagination can still become a decent contributor, you can learn online, you can build things on top of open source, you can read what other people think and follow along. It’s not that programmers back then were smarter than today, just that it was the skills needed were different.