This sounds like a bit of romance for the past, and if any software developers are thinking about "grinding misery", it wasn't any better in the past. My salary as a junior developer in the early 2000s was about $60k, on average. I met someone who had given up a $100k networking job (to do church ministry), and I remember $100k feeling like a number that was just not ever going to be in the realm of possibility for me. Now all the numbers have gone up, but the relatively percentages are about the same. (Except commercial rent, that is a terrible value in my area, but housing prices are reasonable.)