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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder how the last decade and half of tech would have looked like had not ZIRP been around to prop up the industry.

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When I finished undergrad, the most desirable tech company to work for was Microsoft. They paid 55-60K (starting comp) I recall? Interviews were nothing like today (with the insanity of leetcode). What is mind boggling is that I'd have a better quality of life in those days (houses were super cheap) and work was not as competitive/backstabby as today.

The million dollar compensations (when counting stock growth) and intensity/stress around interviews and promotions is what ZIRP wrought for the elite in tech.

Would be interested if people who were mid-career in the mid 90s can comment on their perspective.

> Interviews were nothing like today (with the insanity of leetcode).

Would that mean it was the era of "Why are manhole covers round?"

I don't want to sound like someone who supports leetcode (mostly because I don't), but it seems like it's at least an attempt at measuring something related to programming skills.

Eh...interviews were a mix of brainteasers like the manhole question and coding questions. IIRC some of my MSFT interviews back when allowed pseudocode but mostly wanted to fill the role of e.g. FizzBuzz. Then IIRC there was some validation of C or C++ competency.

Leetcode is FizzBuzz on steroids, but IMHO is not on its own likely to be more predictive of success at a company than the old MSFT way.

Being able to reason about possible design decisions and constraints of things you encounter sounds much more related to programming jobs than being able to code a red-black tree from the top of your head.

> Would that mean it was the era of "Why are manhole covers round?"

"how many balloons can you fit under this table"

High quality of life hinges upon affordable housing prices.

Looking back, the highest quality of life I ever enjoyed was when I was working my first software development job out of university in the 90s. $45K/year comp and I bought a condo for $45K. Imagine: being able to buy an actual house for a mere 1X your yearly salary. Unheard of now. It's been all downhill from there in terms of the cost-of-living:compensation ratio. And that's for software development, one of the more financially lucrative careers out there. It's been even steeper downhill for non-techies.

Was there 96-2000 and agree completely. It was a paradisical time and I knew it, because this was nowhere near my first job. Best work situation I ever had. People were great, and bureaucracy was big enough to be useful but small enough to be intrusive.

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