Bad enough to make you want to quit. People nowadays complain about algos and red-black tress but honestly, that was the easy bit. Wasn't much open source, so

Bad enough to make you want to quit. People nowadays complain about algos and red-black tress but honestly, that was the easy bit. Wasn't much open source, so you had to build pretty much from scratch. Internet was young and empty, so big fat books were how you learned. No condensed version or easy trouble shooting. C and C++ were as dominant as Python is today, but nowhere near as fun. (https://xkcd.com/353/ https://xkcd.com/353/) In short, the deal was to be a cog. If you were good as a small cog, you'd move up to be a bigger cog. Then you could manage a few cogs doing a tiny bit of a huge machine. The scrappiness of just throwing things together and getting something meaningful quick simply wasn't there. I left, spent 15 years of my career doing decidedly different things, and when I came back I was overjoyed with how little code you actually needed now to get stuff done.