When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being …

It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.

> When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast. But I mean, you can get by without memorizing stuff sure, but memorizing stuff does work out your brain and does help out in the long run? Isn't it possible we've reached the cliff of "helpful" tools to the point we are atrophying enough to be worse at our jobs? Like, reading is surely better for the brain than watching TV. But constant cable TV wasn't enough to ruin our brains. What if we've got to the point it finally is enough?

>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age. I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs.

Ah, but lets do leetcode on the whiteboard as interview, for an re-balancing a red-black tree, regardless of how long those people have been in the industry and the job position they are actually applying for.

> "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer Reading books was never about knowledge. It was about knowhow. You didn't need to read all the books. Just some. I don't know how many developers I met who would keep asking questions that would be obvious to anyone who had read the book. They never got the big picture and just wasted everyone's time, including their own. "To know everything, you must first know one thing."