i guess my first "writing software" job was in 1995, so, that's nearly 30 years ago. Although that was a job while I was still a university student. (Creating

i guess my first "writing software" job was in 1995, so, that's nearly 30 years ago. Although that was a job while I was still a university student. (Creating the very first web pages for the university). So I was at the very beginning of my career at that time... and to this day my career has mostly been working in academic and non-profit settings, so not typical to compare, so my memory looking back may be colored by that. But I'd say it was... "smaller". By and large salaries were smaller, not the crazy salaries we hear about on HN (which I don't really receive, to be honest). Work-life balance was a lot more likely to be there by default, things were just... smaller. There were fewer jobs, fewer programmers, a higher percentage of them in academic settings. Other programmers were mostly geeks, in it for a fascination with programming, not dreams of being a billionaire. (Also mostly all white men, which I don't think is great). Even 30 years ago there was (the beginnings of) an internet for learning about how to do things from your peers -- largely via mailing lists or usenet groups though. There was a large sense of camraderie available from such text-based online discusisons, you'd see the same people and get to know them and exchange ideas with them. And sometimes exchange code. I think in some ways 30 years ago may have been close to the height of open source culture. (Raymond wrote the Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1999). As a thing aware of itself, and a culture based around taking pride in collaborating and sharing non-commercially, rather than figuring out how to get rich off open source or "open source". Open source culture was essentially anti-commercial mutual aid. Also, you still often learned from books. There was always A book about any given topic that had gotten community acclaim as being great, and you'd get THAT book (say the Perl Camel book), and read it cover to cover, and feel like you were an expert in the thing. Which meant other people in the community had probably read the same book(s) and had the same basic knowledge base in common. There weren't as many choices. I would say things were just... slower, smaller, chiller, more cooperative. But is this my unique experience or colored by nostalgia?