Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.

The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.

>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.

It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.

Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.

Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?

Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.

There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.

Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.