[Exmoor]

Yes, the vast majority of software engineers in the 90's were working on really mundane products guided by selling units. I would argue it was significantly worse back then because it was a lot more difficult to engage with peers outside your own company and the tooling people used was significantly more likely to include a lot of proprietary niche products.

[b_t_s]

heck yea. There was no github or stack overflow, or the thousands of online forums and offline meetups we have now. Maybe it was better in silicone valley, but in the rest of he world it was pretty dreadful. My career doesn't go back to the 90s, but even in the mid oughts writing firmware, the only people I could find working on the same tech stack as me were the 4 other devs on my team, and if we had a "stack overflow question" we had to just keep banging our heads against it or ask a manager to call the vendor's sales rep to find us an engineering manager who could arrange a conference all with a dev. And there were delights like knocking on a teammate's door to ask how much longer they'd have FooBar.c locked, because you need to edit it too and version control didn't support 2 devs editing the same file. Sure, foundational projects were easier to find back then, but _lot_ of things were a _lot_ worse back in the "good old days".