Warning: all anecdotes. While I don't think that productivity has decreased, what was notepad, a compiler, some dlls and a debugger before turned into a thousand little packages, several configuration files, a bunch of servers you have to run on your dev. computer, which is also 10x more capable, yet everything feels so sluggish.

I also feel that ceteris paribus, the meetings got longer, project management tools now consume a lot of input from programmers, and I need to communicate with a lot more people to get something done.

>"ceteris paribus" Latin for "all things equal".

Sounds for me like productivity went down...

I think the complexity of solutions has gone up (especially in webdev), it seems to me perhaps complexity has gone up way further than actual requirements or new features would suggest...

Which seems to end up meaning productivity has gone down when measured by "things end users of websites can do", even though modern FE devs end up creating much more code and html and css than "the old days". (Admittedly, if you include privacy invasion, user tracking, and various other requirements of surveillance capitalism, dev productivity has probably skyrocketed...)

..eh yes producing mindless importing stuff, generating code, tracking garbadge burocratic stuff went up. Just importing energy consuming crap. Not personal 'productivity' imho but 'work simulation' by click, giving 'reason'. 'solutions' for 'no problems' p.e. A subscription modell for automated driving.. If easy money is to be made the crazyness starts...

Complex? We still call a function with a return value on a stackmachine.

Sorry for the negativity.

In the old days if you managed to create a website it was great. Now people compare everything with Google and Facebook. If you just put something together fast people would just laugh at you. So everything takes a lot longer. The effect is that you get to solve less problems.

"even though modern FE devs end up creating much more code and html and css than "the old days""

And yet, most homepages today can't be viewed without javascript. You are correct, for the end user the complexity has absolutely not resulted in better homepages but worse.

On the other hand, I can now easily write web pages that let people query and view the results of large CFD simulations in interactive 3d.