Knowledge was everything, I bought tons of books and had fun digging into the most obscure and arcane language features. Just mastering things was very rewarding in itself - gave me a feeling of accomplishment and brought the respect of my peers.

Software architecture was a thing - you were given the full responsibility for your component. Something to take seriously. And something you could take pride in, when your process was the first one to run 24/7 without crashing or memory leaks...

Work-life balance was worse for me because I spent lots of "free" time learning stuff to apply at work. Now I'm trying to do things I enjoy. Coding isn't among those things any more - Scrum and its ilk took all the fun out of that.