So with technology improving every year, is it the programmer that is cuasing this? I mean obvious yes, technology is improving... BUT... is this an support for programmers to write poor code?

what?

There are plenty of algorithms that are written perfectly that cannot run on todays hardware in a realistic amount of time: RSA key breaking, real-time ray tracing, climate simulation, many others.

So technology improving just allows us to do more things in "real-time". For instance only in the past few years has realtime voice comprehension become possible.

People have always written poor code no matter how slow the computers were. People will continue to do so.

-me

Can we render photo-realistic scenes in real-time? No? Then there's a good reason for improving technology.

If your processor is X fast and a good programmer can use 99% of that potential and a bad one can use 5%, it doesn't matter how X changes. The percentages are the same. Faster tech means more options open up for everybody.

But faster computers also means we can deploy code more efficiently than before. A product that required X hours of highly experienced coders who could optimize the hell out of it so it could run at a reasonable level can have a similar product released sooner with less coding effort, as it no longer REQUIRES the extra optimizing to simply run.

However, things are a trade off. Write simpler code faster that can get the job done, or continue to write the far more complex code and do more with the product.

it depends on exactly what you define as "poor code",
either how organized the code is versus how efficients it is

but to extend on what Talroth said changes in programming practices have less to do with the increasing power of computers as the increasing scale of a typical software project,
i'd say that the quality hasn't changed much, its just moving from emphasis on efficiency to emphasis on flexibility of code.