Salaries were good but nothing out of line with other entry-level white-collar professionals. So that part is much better today. Everything else I'll say was b

Salaries were good but nothing out of line with other entry-level white-collar professionals. So that part is much better today. Everything else I'll say was better 30 years ago. Despite the lower salaries, programming was a much more respected profession. Today programmers are only seen as unthinking cogs in an agile sprint, where PMs run the show. Quality was much higher, mostly as a byproduct of engineering being driven by engineering, not PMs. You got to own all the technical and most product direction decisions. Only occasionally someone from sales would come in and say Big Customer wants such feature, let's do it. Work-life balance was generally much better since you planned for the long haul, releases maybe yearly instead of permanent sprinting without a long term plan as today with agile.