I'd say that the really huge generational divide is the supply-chainification of software development. I'm just barely old enough to remember the days when a software engineer was responsible for everything between the hardware and the UX. You wrote code that implemented algorithms and data structures; and made choices between what would be computed in CPU, stored in RAM, or paged to disk; and worked on the whole program from the network or disk layer up to the UI.
Now all of these are different roles. You have backend engineers and data engineers and data scientists and front-end engineers (who only deal with modern Javascript and its dozens of frameworks - even 10 years ago a front-end engineer was expected to know how a webserver and HTTP worked) and mobile engineers and AWS experts and Docker/Kubernetes experts to orchestrate it all. If you're actually responsible for the whole program, that's an architect or tech lead role and you don't actually write a whole lot of code. The jobs of each of the people who do write code largely consists of gluing together existing industry-standard frameworks. Algorithms and data structures are stuff you solve on a whiteboard to get the job, and then you never use them once you have the job.
It's the natural evolution of an industry, but it does make the job a lot less interesting. The observations the author makes are a natural outgrowth of this - when you have a lot of separate roles collaborating to build a program rather than a single person designing the whole thing, you need a lot more meetings and e-mails and testing.
Now all of these are different roles. You have backend engineers and data engineers and data scientists and front-end engineers (who only deal with modern Javascript and its dozens of frameworks - even 10 years ago a front-end engineer was expected to know how a webserver and HTTP worked) and mobile engineers and AWS experts and Docker/Kubernetes experts to orchestrate it all. If you're actually responsible for the whole program, that's an architect or tech lead role and you don't actually write a whole lot of code. The jobs of each of the people who do write code largely consists of gluing together existing industry-standard frameworks. Algorithms and data structures are stuff you solve on a whiteboard to get the job, and then you never use them once you have the job.
It's the natural evolution of an industry, but it does make the job a lot less interesting. The observations the author makes are a natural outgrowth of this - when you have a lot of separate roles collaborating to build a program rather than a single person designing the whole thing, you need a lot more meetings and e-mails and testing.