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7 Surprising Ways Coding Changed In The Last 10 Years

Tom Smykowski
5 min readJan 29, 2024

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Senior coders talking about Svelte

Software engineering went through some quite interesting changes during the last ten yeara and no one is talking about them

Do you remember 2014? It was a really nice time. Rosetta probe landed on a comet. Pharell Williams released the Happy song. Scientists confirmed that Ceres contains water vapor. These are just three things that happened during that year, and science, especially deep space science played a huge role.

Now, it’s 2024. It brings a natural question about what have happened during that time in computer science, specifically programming.

To learn some facts I’ve compared StackOverflow Developer Survey from several years since 2014 and 2023, because there’s no results for 2024 yet, and the summary results for 2013 aren’t easily available.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Software Developers Started To Work Remotely

In 2014 only 10% of programmers worked fully remotely. In 2023 41% do it. I’d say we got immune to going to an office. It’s interesting because the high number of remote developers is lasting longer than, you know, hiking bans.

2. Programmers Got Older

Programming is a quite young type of job compared to, say, being an excavator operator. Especially if it comes to the massive number of coders worldwide.

So we thought about it as a thing for young people. But in reality it seems, it was only because older people had already other jobs, and mostly young ones worked as programmers.

StackOverflow seems to prove this to be true. The age ranges differ for various years making it hard to compare without digging into spreadsheets. But in 2015 only 0.5% of programmers were 60+, while in 2023 1.31% were 65+.

So definitely there’s an increase in the percents of older programmers. It needs additional research, but I guess programmers don’t dissappear after reaching their 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s.

What is good, because it can be a lifetime career. Also, older devs could teach us many things. Instead of endless debates why…

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

Hi! My name is Tom Smykowski, and I’m a Staff Frontend Engineer. Grab a free scalable Angular app checklist: https://tomasz-smykowski.com/scalable-angular

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