4 ms·

Yeah I would expect that Microsoft in the late 1980s was paying much more modest salaries for software developers. That job didn't really start paying crazy sal

• jeffbee 6y ago
  I'm curious if you are old enough to remember this stuff first-hand. Microsoft employees were importing ships full of Porsches. Not a joke. Here is a 1992 NYT article about how Microsoft HQ had at least 2200 millionaire employees. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unlikely-millionaires.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unli...
  • throwaway201103 6y ago
    Not really. Was in my early 20s around then, but didn't live anywhere around there. My experience with programming/IT work at that time, was that it was very much a "normal" job. It was a good, solid white collar job, paid decently well, but nothing you'd get really rich doing. That didn't change for me until the late 1990s when I got a dot-com gig for a couple of years (of course we remember how that ended up). Were the MS people buying ships full of Porches with equity earnings or salary?
    • jeffbee 6y ago
      Equity, naturally. In those days it was options and not the grants we mostly see today. You're right about programmer salaries being about in the same league as other professional careers, but I don't see how we can overlook the fact that the stock options existed.
      • selimthegrim 6y ago
        Doesn’t Microserfs go into this?