I agree, there is more to manage. The idea is it should make our job easier. Certain aspects, things that you mentioned, are easier today, but users are demanding applications be more sophisticated and that makes our job more difficult than ever.


>IOW, programming work is becoming bureaucratized. Just count the things around it that you have to manage, this way or other. The numerous libraries, imagery, fonts, sounds, graphic guidelines (parental discretion advised there), version control, db version control, SQL programmables.
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>Which reminds me of one of the core reasons of the dot com bust: many a team, which would have lived happily ever after otherwise, was ruined by investors pushing them to go big. Some were crushed under their own weight.
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>I'm not being entirely nostalgic for the simpler days. This is largely practical, it's about the number of things the team has to manage, that divert energy from production.