Ask HN: How has internet changed software development?

I think it's made a lot of people overestimate their competence and overvalue their 'skill'.

They think being able to Google/SO something is the same as knowing it. Give them a laptop without internet access and most 'developers' wouldn't even be able to get it setup nevermind write 'hello world' from scratch.

There's too much information. Any jamoke with an internet connection can write a blog and consider themselves an epic hax0r for following <latest nifty development principle>. People get bogged down worrying about idioms - am I following SOLID? Would Uncle Bob like my code? Am I writing unit tests? Should I mock my foo class, or maybe make it a stub? Should I integrate my build with Jenkins, and set up email automation when builds fail? Should I follow the factory decorator observer enterprise pattern? The result is lots of time spent sweating over whether or not you're following the latest snake oil pamphlet of "best practices" published on whatever hip tech site you frequent. The days of putting your head down and cranking out functional code and worrying about how "clean" it is later are mostly gone. Programmer productivity has plummeted. Complexity has increased exponentially for simple tasks. It's not great.

Pre-internet: Most programmers I knew had walls of books of reference material. Books like "PC Interrupts", the "386 system design guide", "Zen of Code Optimization" etc.

And I didn't know many programmers. Computers were expensive and so was the software and reference books. I was lucky enough to be able to afford these things.

Also, everything was just slower before the internet. At the rate things change now-- it doesn't make sense to publish books about most programming topics that change much faster than than a book could possibly be published.

The internet also changed computing in general because, that's when computers started working against us (the beginning of surveillance capitalism).