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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as? Because that... actually kind of fits the description of secretaries and computers (as in, the job title), but in practice (in 2022, but it was true in 2010 to a large extent too) it's a little different than that. And I can kind of see it with more imperative "only do this thing" FORTRAN and, later, Excel-as-programming language, but it's weird that it doesn't apply to software as a whole (though MS' Power Apps platform might have something to say about that).
I think that it might be worth looking at the tooling and tools; I believe that software and developers are just uniquely bad at writing good documentation and it's to the point where you actually have to do heavier analysis to get anything done any more.
Maybe having to dig hard to get anything done in all these damn frameworks was job security after all?
Frankly, programming now is far more complicated than it used to be for developers. There are far more moving parts and our expectations of what an engineer has to know and do continue to expand at an insane pace.
Some of that is because of what we expect out of applications, others are self-inflicted wounds by bad software architects.
Consider what someone would consider a simple CRUD application that one day would be maintained with:
That app will still have:
A Database using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design
A middle tier using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design. It must account for security, access to the database, and working with various clients (usually the front end).
The middle tier may itself integrate with other applications, and each of them use a specific security model. It has to translate information from the model used in those external apps into its own (and then sometimes back out)
A front end using language used nowhere else in the application. It too must account for security and access to the middle tier. It utilizes a dizzying collection of packages (along with the worst package manager in the industry) and has to translate information from the middle tier into its own models. It has to handle user input, control-flow logic for users, and routing.
All of this will be managed and deployed with an ALM tool and pushed out to the cloud (if you're lucky). There's a whole 'nother set of security concerns here, the idea of environment progression, tracking work and generating release notes, running tests, and provisioning infrastructure as code itself in YET ANOTHER language used nowhere else in the application.
There are ways to simplify all this - for instance, you could in theory use a single language across an application, though that has serious downsides too.
And of course setting all this up is a solid order of magnitude harder than updating it.
But a typical bug is going to cross-cut against every one of these components. Compare that with writing an accounting program that performs an equation on a couple of numbers that are sent as input into the system, which is mostly what legacy computing was when women were equally represented. You could write out an entire program on a sheet of paper if you were doing it in english. Not the case at all with modern development.
Knowing the languages is the very easiest part, IMO. Getting to know which parts of your application interface with which other ones and which external services how exactly and how the entire CI pipeline works, that's what seems to get more complicated by the day.
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