> Yet they managed to crank out code much faster, and with far fewer bugs, than today's programmers can seem to manage The reality is that today's programmers,

> Yet they managed to crank out code much faster, and with far fewer bugs, than today's programmers can seem to manage The reality is that today's programmers, especially in the big corporations, spend a lot of time not doing programming. It isn't too uncommon that something that takes a half decent programmer a couple of days to bang out is preceded by several weeks of running around trying to get approvals and clarifications on different levels. I guess earlier more trust (and responsibility) was given to the individual developers to decide what to do and how to do it, kind of like in smaller companies nowadays, and with the correct developers that enables a much more productive environment with little to no overhead.