It was a wild year or two. If you could spell C++ or Java, you were employable at salaries well above average. Peak dot-com - the web was going to solve everything and make us all rich at the same time.
Then March 2000 hit and it all fell apart. And quickly.
Anyways, salaries were high. Not current SV/Seattle high, but high enough. IIRC, $50-$60k was a common range for new graduates. Equity was there, but again, not to the same levels as today's unicorns or FAANGs (AOL and a few others being the exceptions).
Work-life balance was similar. Lots of start-ups with none at all, but lots of beer and ping-pong. Mature companies (IBM and government contractors) were a bit better. Microsoft somewhere in the middle.
Waterfall was very much a thing at the Lockheeds of the world. Smaller companies were less rigid, but "agile" wasn't yet an industry buzzword (Agile Manifesto was 2001).
IDEs and tooling were nowhere near as efficient and helpful. Lots more plain old editing in vi or emacs or whatever. Compiling code was a lot more manual - makefiles and such at the command prompt. Version control was 100% manual via CVS or similar.
Better? If you got into AOL early, yeah, because you were rich. For the rest of us, it wasn't better or worse, but it was good then and it's good now.
I made the switch from IBM/370 assembly to Java around this time. It was a good six months or so, with Beer Cart Friday, weekly free massages, and massive plasma TVs in the conference rooms (at iXL in Denver). It was a rough few years after that.
It was a wild year or two. If you could spell C++ or Java, you were employable at salaries well above average. Peak dot-com - the web was going to solve everything and make us all rich at the same time.
Then March 2000 hit and it all fell apart. And quickly.
Anyways, salaries were high. Not current SV/Seattle high, but high enough. IIRC, $50-$60k was a common range for new graduates. Equity was there, but again, not to the same levels as today's unicorns or FAANGs (AOL and a few others being the exceptions).
Work-life balance was similar. Lots of start-ups with none at all, but lots of beer and ping-pong. Mature companies (IBM and government contractors) were a bit better. Microsoft somewhere in the middle.
Waterfall was very much a thing at the Lockheeds of the world. Smaller companies were less rigid, but "agile" wasn't yet an industry buzzword (Agile Manifesto was 2001).
IDEs and tooling were nowhere near as efficient and helpful. Lots more plain old editing in vi or emacs or whatever. Compiling code was a lot more manual - makefiles and such at the command prompt. Version control was 100% manual via CVS or similar.
Better? If you got into AOL early, yeah, because you were rich. For the rest of us, it wasn't better or worse, but it was good then and it's good now.