Re:Why are software development estimates regularly off by a...
by wpietri on Friday November 29, 2013 @08:01PM
(#6821760)
I was in fact around in the early 2000s. And the early 90s. The pendulum swings some, but back in the early days of the web, everything dynamic was hand-rolled, just like I describe.
Perhaps you weren't around in the early 2000s when the RAD tools were all the rage.
Perhaps you missed out on the colossal frameworks of the late 2000s when everything was a factory and understanding HTTP was actually a disadvantage as the whole thing would blow up if you actually tried to access the request body.
We went down the road you talk of. It was horrible. Now the pendulum swings to the opposite ends, the light-weight APIs which don't try and abstract away all the details which it turns out mattered a lot as everyone has to do pretty much the same thing, but ever-so-slightly differently. Tiny tools that do one job well.
All you are talking about is writing HTML and doing server config, neither of which are software or programming. When someone in 2000 came to you and said 'I need a website, therefore I need a software programmer to write html and setup a server' they no more needed a programmer back than then they needed one today. Just back then it was developers who knew the markup language and how to configure servers and they weren't about to turn away silly money just because there was not much actual coding involved.