Not sure about 30 years ago, but 24ish years ago, I wrote software and did systems admin stuff with a thick walnut creek book of linux howtos resting on one leg and a thick book about Perl on the other.
Pay was similar to today if you normalize as a function of rent and gas.
I don't recall seeing a test in the wild until I picked up Ruby on Rails several years later, but there was a lot of manual effort going into QA.
I remember there were a lot more prima donna developers out there who tightly controlled swaths of code, systems, etc. and who companies were afraid to fire.
From my perspective, the software development pipeline is much improved thanks to tests and devops and the move to cloud infrastructure has added a ton of stability that was largely lacking back then.
Pay was similar to today if you normalize as a function of rent and gas.
I don't recall seeing a test in the wild until I picked up Ruby on Rails several years later, but there was a lot of manual effort going into QA.
I remember there were a lot more prima donna developers out there who tightly controlled swaths of code, systems, etc. and who companies were afraid to fire.
From my perspective, the software development pipeline is much improved thanks to tests and devops and the move to cloud infrastructure has added a ton of stability that was largely lacking back then.