> somewhere around the 2010s

It was there in the 90s

Far less prominently. I'll never forget when a programmer I worked with in 2001 or so said that he had decided to study CS in college for the money, having never written a line of code beforehand. The rest of us looked at him like he had squeezed a second head out of his neck. We had first gotten into it as a hobby and were later surprised to find that we could get paid for it. Only a few of us had CS degrees or had even taken CS coursework in college.

	▲	morning-coffee 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. I learned programming in high school in the mid-80's and was hooked. I liked electronics too, and got a BSEE. But took a summer job writing code and never looked back... still coding now, professionally. My analogy is that the 80's and 90's were like the "Golden years" of software jobs... maybe like being in the aircraft industry was in the 30's. Lot's of learning and discovery and fun to be had. Working in software now is probably like I imagine being an aeronautical engineer at Boeing now... you'd better be prepared for being satisfied working on some small part of a much larger and complex system and moving at a glacial pace (compared to the Golden years). (And yeah, the workplace now is flooded with people who seem to be here because they heard it paid well.)

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rconti 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My Information Systems major in college had 6 graduates in 2006. It had been over a hundred a few years prior.