They all had to learn to code in school and had background domain knowledge in some specialty. In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes.

As the years played out it normalized between the two groups as each filled in their own weak spots with experience. But in those early days I was pretty jealous.

Yeah. Going to school for Computer Science is probably the biggest regret in my life. I could have spent that time & money learning something useful/interesting instead, or better yet, not waste my time in University at all.

For me, CS was largely a waste. Most of the real, required-for-job programming skills I learned were self-taught anyway. I just used CS as an on-ramp to industry. Maybe nowadays CS is required for "signalling" but it definitely wasn't in the 90s.

Wish I had done physics or hell even math. Now I'm middle-aged and the only things I "know" relate to this stupid pile of silicon on my desk.

But yes. As a junior developer where my programming skills were roughly the same as my friends who had non-coding skills as well, there was some second guessing on my part

Uh, what? Apparently computer science gets the credit for, eg, the transistor? Nah.

I still don't entirely understand why it turns out to be so hard to outsource. I get some of it, but it seems like something that we should have figured out by now. I'll be interested to see what the post-pandemic shift to remote work does for that.

* It's difficult for Western businesses to time shift, and there are usually caps on work visas.

* Perhaps until recently, most Western programmers genuinely enjoy the work. What I've heard from Indians is that many Indian programmers are more interested in building a career than in the work itself. Intrinstic vs. extrinsic motivation. I think this may be declining as a factor as software eats the rest of the US economy and brain drains talented people from other fields, though.

* Cultural differences--it turns out that English fluency is necessary but not sufficient to seamlessly slot into an Anglosphere company.

* One way out of this conundrum could be for new software companies to start in India and outcompete Western companies (at which point culture differences and time shift wouldn't matter), except I get the sense there are barriers to that.

My current best theory is that the software industry is overflowing with money, and it's still more beneficial to try to optimize for output quality and quantity (i.e. hire better software engineers no matter the cost, bring people into the same locality instead of hampering progress by splitting work into different timezones), instead of trying to cut costs to improve profits.

Once the growth finally ends, outsourcing to cheaper places might become a very attractive option.

Didn’t listen since I loved programming and computers and it worked out well for me.

I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend. When you actually looked into the supposed outsourcing "trend", all you heard about was TheDailyWTF-grade horror stories.

Urban legend? Entire books were written on the subject, by respected authors, too:

https://www.amazon.com/Decline-American-Programmer-Edward-Yo...

The book is not only pushing 30 years old, it was crap when I bought it in hardcover in '93, and whoo boy, did that one not age well.

The problem was too many people entering engineering degrees after a temporary 'IT boom' decades ago, seeing that as a way towards upwards social mobility.

Everything is already created. They would download movies, music, and games with BitTorrent and chat with ICQ and IRC. What else is there to create?

I should go into administration, because that's where the big money is.

I agree that for a tech-savvy consumer end-user, not that much has changed. But endless porting and migrations aside, there are still plenty of businesses and industries that need new software for new ideas. For example most every new concept in medicine or finance needs software.

The field to look at was cognitive science or neurology, which in fairness makes some sense given where machine learning is today.

Today, people are trying to get into tech companies, and those who take one boot camp course call themselves “software engineers.”

In the early 1990s, it sure felt like there was a limited market for robotics, machine learning, AI, etc. It was mostly industrial robotics and assembly line inspection cameras.

You are either building killer robots like Boston Dynamics (morally reprehensible) and drone striking the middle east, or helping people make things with production line robots.

No educated person in the late 90s could have anticipated how Foxconn would obviate "electronics."