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In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it:

Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software.

Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a bug fix was very expensive. Any new release was a big deal, so you had to put some real thought into what features it should contain.

Significant amounts of your development time were not spent trying to work around browser bugs, or differences in browsers, or supporting random old browsers that your customers still use for <reasons>.

Stack churn was much slower. The feeling of constantly trying to keep up with a treadmill was much less.

Users, while often not technology experts, were a much more competent slice of people than the general public who showed up when they got internet service and a computer at home.

The only ads were in print in trade magazines or publications like Computer Shopper. Yes, people actually used to buy a magazine that was nothing but ads.

by saulpw1 hours ago|

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You're right about those things, but you're forgetting that we had no source control, and almost all software was closed source. You took what you were given and you liked it, and you developed strong attachments to particular versions of software which you clung to well beyond its use-by date (like Python 2.7). MS-DOS 3.3 forever!

by MyHonestOpinon1 hours ago|

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I started using SCCS in the late 80s, then RCS, then CSV, then subversion, and finally git.

by skydhash1 hours ago|

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We had version control in the 70s with SCSS and then RCS. They were primitive, but a lot of software were only a few files.

by saulpw1 hours ago|

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In the 80s, source control was like networking. Yes some orgs had it (mostly academia) but the rest of us just had a precious floppy that we copied the known-good source onto.

by cdud37 minutes ago|

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We had an own good-releases directory in our svn repository! That's when you realize old habits are hard to change.

by butlike1 hours ago|

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Going to CompUSA and looking at the back of the box for not only video games, but spreadsheet and translation software, too; was awesome. As a kid I always wondered about the adults who needed such software as the back of the Deus Ex or Shogun Total War boxes captured my imagination.

Since it sounds like you built software during that era, thanks. Thanks for the memories.

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by MyHonestOpinon1 hours ago|

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I also consider myself a fairly good pragmatic software engineer. I have led small (3 engineers), medium (15), and large (100+) teams.

To me, the best time was late 90s, early 2000s. We had a lot of autonomy. People would just trusted that we knew what and how to build it. I could focus on building a great product. Overtime, we lost control, to the point that we now work based on jira tickets made by managers or product owners with one tenth of the experience that we have.

by closeparen48 minutes ago|

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I definitely hear about segments of the industry being like that, but FAANG and adjacent generally isn't. Engineers are expected to display ownership of a problem space (scope depending on seniority), navigate ambiguity, and manage their own time.