There was a lot more independence and respect 20 years ago. Now, much like the highlight in the article, there's a great deal of emphasis put on "team" and ofte

There was a lot more independence and respect 20 years ago. Now, much like the highlight in the article, there's a great deal of emphasis put on "team" and often cargo-cult style practices (IE: if we do these things, we'll be a high-performing team). Even as software has spread into more corners of our life and the number of developers has expanded, I don't see the professional respect that developers had 20 years ago. The infrastructure tools / documentation / pre-built parts have made our lives easier, but the number of tools and technologies we need to understand on a typical project has also exploded. We used to need to develop deep expertise - say on database management - that today gets abstracted away to AWS (this is not to say that those skills aren't still valuable and useful, just different...). There's a lot more technology-choice-by-fad today. We didn't have as many choices or the instant access and bombardment of opinions back in the day, so decisions were slower, IE: we didn't just switch out tools on a whim because it "sounded like a good idea"