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?
> they don't care if they paid more than the average Texan pays, because at the end of the day they're still paying less than half what they were paying in CA
I don't understand not caring about 6 figures of money. Is that really the outlook of the average California tech worker?
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 salaries until the VC money arrived with the Dot-Com wave.
You're looking at it from the wrong side. Developer supply for SV companies just expanded to include potentially everyone who for various reasons did not want to or was unable to relocate to SV. Tech salaries will fall for SV companies, though it might initially be a bump up from what those non-local developers could get in their local areas.
Well I like my Bose headphones, which use a single AAA battery but they are corded. Wireless anything is a hard no for me due to poor experience with it. I know a lot of people disagree.
Were the MS people buying ships full of Porches with equity earnings or salary?