What is the biggest change to working in IT since you started your career?

[Gittins Gal]

I guess this question will elicit very different answers from those of you who started out your careers loading up the operating system every morning with punched cards to us noobs for whom the internet was already in full swing as we entered our fledgling careers.

Since I started, technology has moved on in terms of hardware, the advent of smartphones etc but I'd say that the biggest change to my day to day working life in IT has to be my apparent transition from a programmer who would write fairly complex routines to a configurer who spends half her time fiddling around with config files to plug into some framework that does all the stuff that I would have once written myself.

[zoco]

Indians everywhere.

[Avalonia]

Exactly , are there any left back on the subcontinent ?

[Alias]

A support community with guidance for every step

[mudskipper]

A support community with guidance for every step

Yep, no idea how we did it before google.


We used to make Christmas decorations out of paper tape and punch cards.
Now we just plug a Christmas tree into our USB port.

[darmstadt]

Electricity

[SimonMac]

Computers!

Compare the computer you are typing this on with the first one you got your hands on

[malvolio]

First computer I worked on had 64k core memory - and when I say "core", that's exactly what it was, ferrite rings - aka cores - magnetised by two crossed wires with a third to work out which way round the magnetic field was going... My current watch has more grunt!

I think there have been too many changes to highlight any one as being significant and Turing's Law still holds. Moving intelligence from code to middleware (and even down to OS), meaning code cutting has changed significantly, probably had the biggest impact overall, but I was coding like that with 3GL languages in the 80s, with stuff like Filetab, QTP and the like.

The big change has been to move the "computer" from being a doer to being a facilitator: we used to get printouts with all the necessary data to work with , now we take information off the screen and can play with it in real time.

[smatty]

For me it's the move to outsourcing rather than entire systems being delivered in-house.

May just be the clients I've had but the main impact is that people doing the work are more focused on closing service requests within SLA than the actual delivery of a solution because that's generally how the outsource arrangements seem to be made. As a result there is a new role spawned for a technical lead who can understand the entire solution and help everyone deliver in that kind environment.

[malvolio]

For me it's the move to outsourcing rather than entire systems being delivered in-house.

May just be the clients I've had but the main impact is that people doing the work are more focused on closing service requests within SLA than the actual delivery of a solution because that's generally how the outsource arrangements seem to be made. As a result there is a new role spawned for a technical lead who can understand the entire solution and help everyone deliver in that kind environment.