[–] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

I went to India in the early '90s and happened to see a small software shop that had five programmers and one PC. The programmers wrote all their code with pencil and paper and the secretary typed it all into the computer. I want to say that this explains a lot about the quality of offshore code, but it probably doesn't.

I myself just caught the tail end of the punch card era. It was actually kinda fun to sit at home with just a stack of cards and create working (hopefully, you wouldn't know for days) code.

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  • [–] 22 points 6 hours ago

    I was a programmer for 25 years starting in the mid-90s. I've had numerous coworkers end up working at Microsoft. I'll admit I was jealous of their insane salaries, but I have to say they were all some combination of terrible programming ability and utter apathy towards their job. The only thing that surprises me is that it took fucking AI for things to get this bad.

    I will say that I did have some professional interactions with older MS programmers, the generation that was working for them in the '80s and '90s. These people were genuinely competent, but by the time I interacted with them they were all multi-millionaires and had fallen solidly into the "utter apathy" category.

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