My observation about being in Silicon Valley in the 80s/90s was the overall changing environment and ethos of the people there. I am sure there are going to be some massive simplifications here, so bear with me.

One is the overall environment back then. Things weren't cheap, but rent was much more affordable in relation to pay. NeXT paid well, you could rent in decent place in Burlingame, Foster City, Redwood City, etc. The commute down Seaport was fairly quick and traffic was light. Things seemed less crowded and frenetic and that made going into the office less of a chore. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is pretty intense. The tiny townhouse I bought in Cupertino near the current Apple campus was $150,000. It recently sold for 1.2 million. I haven't charted it, but the relation between compensation and housing costs have to be wildly out of proportion to when I bought the place. I was pulling a very good salary at the time and a lot of that money went into savings and investments. Now, I imagine a lot of that income would go into mortgages and expenses. Maybe current residents can comment.

The overall attitude seemed to be more about doing new and interesting things and maybe the money will follow. There wasn't as much of a go to Silicon Valley and get rich doing a startup. Maybe this was just an echo of some Berkeley hippie vibe that was present in a lot of the tech startups back then.

The new and interesting things also seemed more accessible. It seemed like there was less gatekeeping and more ways to get involved with "cool" stuff. Maybe this was also an echo of the Homebrew Computer club and early computer hacker ethos.

I do work person to person in a company, but I feel super lucky to have gotten this role. Really good in-person roles just seem super rare. The ones that I have been exposed to at Amazon, Google, Facebook and other current hiring centers just seem miserable to me. Please correct me if I am wrong and am missing the big picture.