[jasonfarnon]

A lot of pre-faang engineers dont have the stash you're thinking about. What you meant was "right when I found a lucrative job that I love". What was going on in tech these last 15 years, unfortunately, probably was once in a lifetime.

[WarmWash]

It's crazy to think back in the 80's programmers had "mild" salaries despite programming back then being worlds more punishing. No libraries, no stack exchange, no forums, no endless memory and infinite compute. If you had a challenging bug you better also be proficient in reading schematics and probing circuits.

[lurking_swe]

on the bright side software evolved much more slowly in the 80s. You could go very far by being an expert in 1 thing.

People had real offices with actual quiet focus time.

User expectations were also much lower.

pros and cons i guess?