15 years ago you could get a software job by showing some passion, intelligence, a CS degree from a average university, and some knowledge of memory / space com

15 years ago you could get a software job by showing some passion, intelligence, a CS degree from a average university, and some knowledge of memory / space complexity of typical data structures and algorithms. And, if the hiring manager (usually a programmer) liked you? Job offer on the spot. Sure, you got paid 50-60k / year, but it was what it was. And, you actually got to work with an entire team of people under reasonable deadlines, 40 hours a week, with a real office, with clear objectives and scope, and an actual schedule. You got to actually use your brain and some creativity (not just google the 'best' answer or look on stack overflow or steal some code from github). Projects sometimes failed, almost always because of requirement failures, and sometimes the code was beautiful; most of the time it was average; sometimes the code was really bad. Today, you have to go through hours and hours of phone screens, technical interviews, team meet and greets, etc. You have to know how to implement a distributed KD-Tree with skip lists in brainfuck. And, then they nitpick the code on style. And, sure, you get paid 90-150k / year now. (Wow!) But, it's such a time consuming process. And, the smart (or motivated) people know how to game the interview anyway (there are lots of resources out there on how to beat the interview process). And, even when you ace the interview it's still often difficult to get a straight answer on whether your hired or not (strangely more so if you're over 40). They say that software developers are in high demand... I say that people just hate the idea that software developers make a respectable wage. But, the funny thing is, after working in this field for over 15 years, after working with 100s of people and seeing millions of lines of code, the truth is that the projects are still failing, and the code is just as bad as it ever was. And, projects still fail most often because of bad requirements, poor vision, and bad management. In fact, I drink the koolaid: I hire people who ace the interview, and you know what I've found? There's a 50/50 chance that they're just as good as the person who I hired who failed parts of the interview (sometimes I'm desperate). And, those people don't bring down the project - it's the guy in the corner office. Luckily, I was smart enough to save a lot of money over the years. I'm just too old for this shit.