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However, that doesn't mean that it doesn't take a lot to become a decent programmer. It does. And not just in terms of time, but perhaps most importantly in terms of intellectual maturity.
People can even practice programming on their phone with termux. Anyone can program anytime instead of having to wait to use the family computer for just an hour like back in the day. It's so easy to get mileage in.
The complexity of frameworks has increased, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the learning material on the fundamentals is more available and free.
This medium article[1] argues there is a decline of genius.
> I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.
But I believe we are in a golden age, innovations are made every year, life keeps getting better. Change is so frequent that it has become mundane and we don't appreciate it.
Many people are taking advantage of the quality of learning resources, and it's speeding up the development of everything.
[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...
It may be like that for some, but generally in the 90s computers were widely available and those interested were usually allowed by their family to use them as needed.
There were tutorials. There were digital manuals. It was not that different.
But now practically everyone no matter the country has a phone now. The availability is much higher. There are more ways to learn, videos from harvard and fun games are the new introductions instead of manuals.
Everyone else either had that access (Europe, Australia, Japan, even Russia) or is still too poor to have time or is lacking the necessary fundamental education to be able to focus on it even now (for example, much of Africa, unfortunately).
(You might laugh at MS Access but it was useful at least 3 times in my career, but mostly in the 25-15 year ago range.)
Comprehension takes time. Thinking for yourself, making smart architectural decisions, working in an ambiguous stack, and so on.
The nature of the shortcut for experience is the same. Experience crushes anything you learned elsewhere. My best engineers are senior engineers with a fuck load of experience for a reason.
How much time it would take to achieve level that in 1998 would need 10 years?
The “24 hours” figure is marketing copy designed to unify and differentiate a brand of technical manuals.
The person who coined the 10,000 hours rule (Anders Ericsson) rejects it as an oversimplification of an arbitrary number, noting that half of the violinists in his study fell short of that number. The ten years figure is derived from this flawed rule.
The linked article is well-written, but the comments are giving “kids these days” insecurity and mid-life crisis.