The generational analysis is definitely not correct.

There is certainly a smaller proportion of enthusiast developers among those entering the industry. But that isn’t because kids today have iPads instead of C64’s.

Among the Xennials (or “Millenial Falcons” as Dylan Beattie calls them), even of those who had C64’s, very few of them were typing in games in Basic, most were playing Pitfall or using other consumer software and never developed any curiosity beyond that.

By percentage, a far greater percent of kids today have access to programming in Minecraft or Roblox, or on Arduino or Raspberry Pi etc etc. Or learning to program using JavaScript on the web, or Pico-8, or any number of other platforms that are now available. While you were considered an “enthusiast” for launching your C64 games from commodore basic, enthusiast kids today are hand-coding serial PIO protocols on a Raspberry Pi Pico to flash their RetroArch compiled from source for their mips32 handheld console.

So why is there a smaller proportion of enthusiast developers entering the industry? Because the flow of enthusiasts are drastically outnumbered by masses and masses of people who are swarming to the industry because of the widespread impression that it pays well and that there are jobs available.

“Learn to code” is the defining 2010’s-2020’s meme describing what is perceived as only way to find gainful employment in the modern economy. All of the prominent, richest people in America are well known to have earned their riches in tech. All of this draws the attention of swarms and swarms of young people with no particular interest in computers per se, but a keen interest in being employed and making a living.

Along with that competition, “enthusiasts” are not just drowned out, they are often edged out. There are simply higher expectations of programmers today. People who would have succeeded as enthusiasts in the past are now edged out by competition who may be better at interpersonal relationships or office politics or just the ability to hold down a job/complete tasks etc. Or for that matter, just better at writing organized professional code where the younger “enthusiasts” of the past got away with hacking.

Talk to anyone who has been in this industry 50 years, they were tell you that the kind of code that passed for acceptable in their first 20, 30 years of programming would now get you fired. Hard to believe, but today’s boot camp grads, as bad as they seem to us today, are actually legitimately better coders than were the average entry-level 80’s-90’s programming enthusiasts.

So yes, the era of the enthusiast programmer is over. You can’t hire “all 10x developers” because there simply aren’t that many available. Programming is now an ordinary job populated by a whole bunch of “normals”. But no, it’s not because of some generational difference that we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to load up Commander Keen and it built character somehow. No, today is actually a much better time than ever for a child to grow up as a computer enthusiast.