It was a lot easier; practically, extremely simple.
1. Processes: in smaller companies there was very little paperwork/red tape. You got the requirements, do the design, have a review, start coding, test, deploy. In most cases I've seen, there were just 2 environments, development and production.
2. Design was very, very simple: not many choices and coding was straightforward, no OOP, a Hello World program had a single line of code. Almost no libraries, frameworks, dependencies. (maybe an oversimplification, but you get the point)
3. Work life balance. We had Duke Nukem 3D parties in the office in the evening, that was the only cases where people did not leave at 5PM. There was no rush, overtime, emergencies - except my team that was doing support 24x7, but that was still fine.
4. Compensation. It really depends on the country, but at that time I had the best pay in my life as ration between my salary and country average. It only declined over time, even if in USD it is a bigger number today. Taxes also raised a lot.
5. Productivity and performance of the code is a lot better, but the life of the developers is a lot harder; the area is just too complex to be really good over time, the number of changes for the sake of change is enormous, the fragmentation of languages, libraries and frameworks in insane. There is no good way to do things right, there are 1,000,000 ways to do it and nobody can compare them all.
6. Not asked, but ...: people were a lot more competent on average. At least what I see in the market todays is developer by the kilograms, with very good developers lost in a sea of sub-mediocrity. Also, the pace of change is so fast, most people never get to become experts in something before it changes. It is like working while running.
I am not a real developer for over a decade as I do architecture and management, but I am the most technical in my area of over 1000 IT people; even if I don't write code full time, I am very close still.
1. Processes: in smaller companies there was very little paperwork/red tape. You got the requirements, do the design, have a review, start coding, test, deploy. In most cases I've seen, there were just 2 environments, development and production.
2. Design was very, very simple: not many choices and coding was straightforward, no OOP, a Hello World program had a single line of code. Almost no libraries, frameworks, dependencies. (maybe an oversimplification, but you get the point)
3. Work life balance. We had Duke Nukem 3D parties in the office in the evening, that was the only cases where people did not leave at 5PM. There was no rush, overtime, emergencies - except my team that was doing support 24x7, but that was still fine.
4. Compensation. It really depends on the country, but at that time I had the best pay in my life as ration between my salary and country average. It only declined over time, even if in USD it is a bigger number today. Taxes also raised a lot.
5. Productivity and performance of the code is a lot better, but the life of the developers is a lot harder; the area is just too complex to be really good over time, the number of changes for the sake of change is enormous, the fragmentation of languages, libraries and frameworks in insane. There is no good way to do things right, there are 1,000,000 ways to do it and nobody can compare them all.
6. Not asked, but ...: people were a lot more competent on average. At least what I see in the market todays is developer by the kilograms, with very good developers lost in a sea of sub-mediocrity. Also, the pace of change is so fast, most people never get to become experts in something before it changes. It is like working while running.
I am not a real developer for over a decade as I do architecture and management, but I am the most technical in my area of over 1000 IT people; even if I don't write code full time, I am very close still.