Microsoft in the mid-90s didn't seem like it was having much impact on Seattle itself. If there was a staffing explosion, it just wasn't evident in town. Redmond and the rest of the 405 corridor? Yeah, maybe. But not so much Seattle itself.

By contrast, the "Californication" period (say, 87-94) and the tech boom actually took place in the city itself. Keep in mind that in the 87-94 period, Boeing and UW were still the two largest employers in Puget Sound. Companies like Microsoft were "good" for the economy, but they weren't quite the behemoths that they became as the tech boom happened (and, coincidentally, as I left :)

Yeah I would expect that Microsoft in the late 1980s was paying much more modest salaries for software developers. That job didn't really start paying crazy salaries until the VC money arrived with the Dot-Com wave.

I'm curious if you are old enough to remember this stuff first-hand. Microsoft employees were importing ships full of Porsches. Not a joke. Here is a 1992 NYT article about how Microsoft HQ had at least 2200 millionaire employees.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unli...

Not really. Was in my early 20s around then, but didn't live anywhere around there. My experience with programming/IT work at that time, was that it was very much a "normal" job. It was a good, solid white collar job, paid decently well, but nothing you'd get really rich doing. That didn't change for me until the late 1990s when I got a dot-com gig for a couple of years (of course we remember how that ended up).

Were the MS people buying ships full of Porches with equity earnings or salary?

Equity, naturally. In those days it was options and not the grants we mostly see today. You're right about programmer salaries being about in the same league as other professional careers, but I don't see how we can overlook the fact that the stock options existed.

Doesn’t Microserfs go into this?

One thing I don't understand, if dwellings weren't built while population grew, where do people live?

You seem to be assuming that all habitable spaces (houses, apartments, etc) are fully occupied all the time. This isn't the case.