I joined the industry after the dotcom boom, and I got the impression that older companies such as IBM were very very mediocre in pay, nothing like Google.
Was that not always true? You see that many people who joined after the IPO were able to retire after 15 years at Google (or Amazon), did that really happen at places like IBM for the average senior engineer?
You'd here about engineers who sometimes became multi-millionaires from an IPO that went well, but now people can become multi-millionaires from W-2 RSUs and a little bit of stock growth.
IBM is cut from a very different cloth than Silicon Valley companies that were actually founded and ran in SV in the 80s / 90s. I wouldn't use them as the measuring stick.
Microsoft was pretty well known to pay really well too (granted out of Seattle / Redmond, but they grafted the SV culture really well). They also had perks and bonuses and big stock grants. Netscape, Yahoo! etc. They all had some variation of this going on.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/secretaries-get-rich-in-the-in...
My understanding is adjusted for inflation the minimally skilled developer was actually better off on the mid to late 90’s. The median developer was in a roughly similar situation. The elite’s pay was comparable, but today we have a larger percentage of people in that elite category.
PS: IBM isn’t Silicon Valley. Many developers today are still making sub 120k, but that’s really not what we’re talking about.
Historically a huge range of perks have been tossed around including some that have gone away like company cars due to tax code changes that eliminated the benefits. There’s long been ebb and flow around what perks are common, and which ones stick around as the company grows.
One that I wish caught on was Microsoft being rather famous for offering engineers an actual office with doors that closed.