> But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me.
I know the feeling. We still have access to the engineering thought processes responsible for some of the most amazing software feats ever accomplished (thru source repo history and mailing lists), just with access to the Internet. Of course there's a wealth of info available for free on the web for basically any profession, but for software engineering in particular it's almost direct access to world class teams/projects to learn from.
> but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge
To be effective you still need to understand and evaluate the quality of the output. There will always be a certain amount of time/effort required to get to that point (i.e., there's still no silver bullet).
> But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
We're not running out of things that can be improved. With or without these tools, the better you get, the more of the passion/energy that gets directed at higher levels of abstraction, i.e. thinking more about what to solve, tradeoffs in approaches, etc. instead of the minute details of specific solutions.
I know the feeling. We still have access to the engineering thought processes responsible for some of the most amazing software feats ever accomplished (thru source repo history and mailing lists), just with access to the Internet. Of course there's a wealth of info available for free on the web for basically any profession, but for software engineering in particular it's almost direct access to world class teams/projects to learn from.
> but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge
To be effective you still need to understand and evaluate the quality of the output. There will always be a certain amount of time/effort required to get to that point (i.e., there's still no silver bullet).
> But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
We're not running out of things that can be improved. With or without these tools, the better you get, the more of the passion/energy that gets directed at higher levels of abstraction, i.e. thinking more about what to solve, tradeoffs in approaches, etc. instead of the minute details of specific solutions.