That wasn't it. It's just that the position wasn't so highly paid back in the day and there was way less demand, so hardly anyone was even interested.
The moment it became remotely attractive, the tech bros arrived.
People with good software skills had paths to making a lot of money from the day computers became widely available.
Look at Woz in the 70s or Microsoft or the Macintosh team. From the birth of the PC revolution there was a path to getting rich from computer skills if you were in the right place at the right time.
My aunt's career as an IT engineer started in the 80s. She went into this field because it was a new niche to explore and hardly anyone knew their way around it.
Her role was to take part in digitalisation of the bank she was working in and by "digitalisation" I mean first putting the equipment together.
The reality is there was a sweet spot - when the industry got less toxic and started attracting visible minorities, and you started getting some diversity of thought AND passion.
Then the money got too good and it started attracting the personalities that 10 years earlier would've become finance bros and caused the 2008 crash. And they fucked it all up.
Itβs 10x worse with the tech bro chest thumping and the competitive toxic behaviors inside teams.
And autonomy/ownership has is now rock bottom with multidisciplinary teams. Even things made supposedly to empower devs like Agile/Scrum became tools of a managerial class that wants to decide where each pixel goes.
There were major downsides to the days when programmers were all computer nerds. Specifically, it made the career very off-putting to anybody who didn't fit that stereotype. Any time you do that, you miss out on a lot of potential talent.
Still, though. There were upsides. The passion level seemed higher. The climbing salaries attracted people solely attracted to... the climbing salaries.
I'm tired of being treated like a fucking Martian because I understand basic data structures and why sometimes you might want to use a tree or some other computer science 101 shit.
Are you explicit about this when you pose the problems?I can see an upside to not telling them. If they try to bullshit their way through an answer because they think a definitive answer is expected, I guess that could be a useful data point. But it feels mean and unethical.
When I've done this as interviewer I've been pretty explicit. Like, "Hey, this is something we've been working our way through for months and we don't expect you to figure it out in ten minutes. But how might you approach this?"
I have fairly limited experience as an interviewer so I'm curious how others have approached this.