I attended a well regarded Engineering school back in the mid '90s and people were getting developer and "IT" jobs really quickly and without much interview rigamarole. If you could build a computer and install Windows you'd probably get an IT job (not a great one, but the pay was decent). Able to configure an office NAT? You must be a networking genius. Pure software developer jobs were harder to get than IT jobs, but not that much harder. It was also easier for people with Engineering Degrees (e.g. Electrical Engineering) to get an actual decent paying engineering job as opposed to software becoming a landing place for all degrees engineering.
That being said, a lot of stuff that is trivial today was a complete mess. Ever spent days debugging why all the new computers are crashing and it turned out to be the driver for your network card conflicting with another card the IT department installed? Jobs in software and IT could be a total mess because of all the different things technical people were doing.
I worked for a small company with a CEO who had done well for themselves running a small non-tech company and they decided to invest their money in a .com/internet venture. It was almost a textbook example of a CEO who thought there was money just waiting on the internet and all you had to was build something. No strategy around how to make money, users, or much of anything. The company was circling the drain even before the product was released and I was too young and stupid to quit the day the paychecks started bouncing. I don't think that's very different than many startups today.
Another friend worked for a bigger hardware company that was living on all the .com money floating around. He loved it. When everything went bust that company went bust as well. Another friend was a CEO of a company that was "Surviving on signed contracts where we signed a contract with another company and they signed a contract with us." You can imagine what happened when the bust occurred - all that paper money vanished.
I actually think software jobs are a lot better now. There's a lot more definitions and better discipline about what a developer does. The tooling is certainly better. I think there's also more respect and awareness about software development from others. Plus, I can move my big monitor now and not end up with a back injury :)
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I attended a well regarded Engineering school back in the mid '90s and people were getting developer and "IT" jobs really quickly and without much interview rigamarole. If you could build a computer and install Windows you'd probably get an IT job (not a great one, but the pay was decent). Able to configure an office NAT? You must be a networking genius. Pure software developer jobs were harder to get than IT jobs, but not that much harder. It was also easier for people with Engineering Degrees (e.g. Electrical Engineering) to get an actual decent paying engineering job as opposed to software becoming a landing place for all degrees engineering.
That being said, a lot of stuff that is trivial today was a complete mess. Ever spent days debugging why all the new computers are crashing and it turned out to be the driver for your network card conflicting with another card the IT department installed? Jobs in software and IT could be a total mess because of all the different things technical people were doing.
I worked for a small company with a CEO who had done well for themselves running a small non-tech company and they decided to invest their money in a .com/internet venture. It was almost a textbook example of a CEO who thought there was money just waiting on the internet and all you had to was build something. No strategy around how to make money, users, or much of anything. The company was circling the drain even before the product was released and I was too young and stupid to quit the day the paychecks started bouncing. I don't think that's very different than many startups today.
Another friend worked for a bigger hardware company that was living on all the .com money floating around. He loved it. When everything went bust that company went bust as well. Another friend was a CEO of a company that was "Surviving on signed contracts where we signed a contract with another company and they signed a contract with us." You can imagine what happened when the bust occurred - all that paper money vanished.
I actually think software jobs are a lot better now. There's a lot more definitions and better discipline about what a developer does. The tooling is certainly better. I think there's also more respect and awareness about software development from others. Plus, I can move my big monitor now and not end up with a back injury :)