I'm a 50-something, recently retired but still programming for fun and non-profits. "Rock star" meant something different 30 years ago. Less was expected of you, but also the tools and technologies weren't there to help you. No databases in the cloud, no google or stackoverflow. You had to wait for books to come in and hope they had the information you needed, otherwise you took a week and figured it out for yourself. My very first job, my IBM PC clone had two floppies. My code was on drive b:. I would put the editor floppy in drive a:, edit, then put in the compiler floppy, then the linker floppy. Programming in C, manual memory management. I was good then, I'm good now. Lessons learned then no doubt honed my skills in general, but I don't know if I "use" those skills nowadays.