After also taking about a decade-long hiatus from the dev-side of business, I was thrust into several roles that put me into a similar realization. A lot has changed since the mid-2000's, but I'm not sure it's all for the best.

Yes, tools have gotten much better across more platforms than just windows. There is a cornucopia of libraries that incorporate a huge amount of the mundane tasks that used to have to be rolled ourselves. Even most workflow tools have centralized to a point where organizations rarely diverge too far outside the realm of standard processes, which makes developers much more mobile.

But, when did the shift occur where devs spend most of their time writing tests rather than actual code? I found that across several organizations, there was more of a concern with making sure secondary supporting systems were taken care of (CI, Testing, etc.) than actually producing core workproduct. There seems to be an obsession with form over function.

And what ever happened to documentation? Not the interspersed block of say-nothing comments on a random class or object, but actual substantive doc. In fairness, this seems to be domain specific though. The typical Java wrangler can be coerced to provide doc, but I've had Node devs laugh at the suggestion because, "You know, we're agile..."Anyway, thank you for this opportunity to gripe as only an old curmudgeon can properly do.