How has the "developer lifestyle" changed over the years?

[Dani]

How do you think the "developer lifestyle" has changed from when you started today? Better, worse, or just different? I feel like at the very least, we can probably all acknowledge that it's become a lot more mainstream these days and is looked upon as a career that has the potential to make you a lot of money (at least here in silicon valley). That compared to back in the 1980s and 1990s where the image in my head are nerds in a dark basement somewhere playing Dungeons and Dragons. And I think those outside influences, what other people think of us, has at least some influence to our own lifestyle, no? The friendships we keep. The ease at which we can walk through life. I dunno. Perhaps I'm getting a bit existential here.

[trcooke]

You and I are a similar age Dani and have been at this programming game for a similar amount of time, you perhaps a little longer than I. In my experience I don't feel like much has changed at all over the last couple of decades, my current professional project is being built in much the same way as my first professional project was back in 2006.

The more I read books from the decades prior to my entry into the profession, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (00s), Design Patterns (90s), The Practice of Programming (90s), The Mythical Man Month (70s), Structured Design (70s), the more I realise things haven't changed all that much in the last half a century.

Writing code was never the hard part.

[Dani]

I think you misunderstand my question. I'm not asking about whether you write your code the same way. I'm asking about whether your lifestyle has changed over the years. I used to be a hardware geek. All my friends were also computer people, and I mostly felt very misunderstood by everyone outside my little "community". Now I'm a web developer who sells advertising for a living who lives in Silicon Valley.

As I alluded to in my original post, back then most people (including my family) I would have to say looked down a bit on computer nerds. Now we rule the world :)