And of course, the Web became widespread around that time, as well. Whatever you might think about "hyper-scale advertisement services, global human tracking, and digital Skinner boxes", Amazon first became prominent in the dotcom era, and it's quite massive today.
While some newer languages are interesting, the dev stacks today are a mess.
Also, While we have safe pointers and GC everywhere, the lack of technical discipline/professionalism in the industry is worse than ever. I recognize that the C-suite and VCs share in the blame for this, but devs are the ones building things and evangelizing the newest-hotness that comes onto the scene.
But I do have to remind myself that compared to traditional engineering tracks, software engineering is still in its infancy.
/get-off-my-lawn
What concerns me quite a bit is the overt opposition we're now seeing to professionalism in the industry. The whole 'post-meritocracy' shtick, regardless of the best intention of the "useful innocents" who came up with that particular phrasing, is really a way of saying: "Professionalism? What professionalism? There's no such thing, we know better than that! Brogrammers r00lz FTW!" Again, this is clearly not what the proponents were seeking-- but in some sense, it's what the phrase actually means, out there in the real world.
/salty
I will shut up and go back to building this Android app I am working on -- what a horror-show of a platform.
Each time a new "hotness" language, framework, pattern, or dev/devops process comes out you have a rush of professional gurus working hard to build their business (e.g., speaking fees/books/blogging/training) by teaching that this is the new true way.
In the late 90's I began to notice how the new kids kept advocating for the newest so-called best practices to do things that the bad-old practices could handle just fine. Seeing the writing on the wall, I dipped out of the game a few years later.
Unfortunately, the unhelpful tech churn has worsened. Similarly, the quality of the product produced has worsened, or at best, not improved.
Note, hyper-scale advertisement services, global human tracking, and digital Skinner boxes are not an improvement to anything.
Meanwhile 50 year-old programmers with deep general development knowledge cannot find jobs. I guess it is easier for young founders to justify using frothy tech if there are fewer old-timers around to suggest otherwise.
edit-to-add:
/get-off-my-lawn