I commented on "Peak Computing" at the Archdruid Report.

I would put it around 2000 or the early aughts.

In the 90s a colleague here at Prestigious University (PU) advised me that I'd never rise above bare subsistence if I didn't change job categories. She gave me a copy of the dBase programming language.

So I wrote a program that replaced 20 hours a week of typing (on a typewriter) with maybe an hour of computing. I gave the program to other (bigger) units. This got me promoted to Programmer.

In the aughts PU decided we should scrap that program, and spend a million dollars to get the same commercial software that our sister universities were all buying.

Long story short: it was inferior. Two colleagues went on disability rather than switch back to tons of repetitive typing (albeit now on a computer).

To be fair-- management was by then becoming scared of coders, because when one got hired away, they could be left with code that nobody else could maintain. This fear swept over all industries and burocracies, as near as I can tell.

(But there must have been a better solution-- training and cross training more programmers, and paying them well, for instance.)

Anyway, I could tell story after story of good homegrown programs that did exactly what we wanted being replaced with expensive bloated monstrosities marketed as miracles that they assured us would do exactly what we wanted, but never actually did, while making some suits rich.

Our IT department is filled mostly with people called Programmers who can install software and maintain machines, but who can't write a bit of code.

JIRA, Peoplesoft, Kronos: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."