And that list of companies is sort of a mixed bag.
Adobe has mostly done pretty well through the years.
Sun Microsystems did have a very good decade through the dot-com years but then didn't.
Apple was really struggling at that time.
DEC was on the way down and would be bought by HP a few years later.
Microsoft was about to launch Windows NT so that was a pretty good place to hop on but obviously went on to have a long period of stagnation.
If you were at Apple, you'd be working on a platform (Mac OS classic, or Copland, or Newton) that would be thrown away by the end of the decade.
If you were working at DEC, likewise. (VMS, VAX, even Alpha)
Sun is more complicated, as they pivoted better and took longer to die. That would be a good place to be maybe.
1991 is an awkward year since it's about 2-3 years before the HTTP/browser revolution.
One thing though is that to my eye when I look at what these companies were working on then, it all seems more interesting to me now. The actual employment of a programmer (who wasn't stuck in finance or insurance etc. doing COBOL) had the potential to do some stuff that we at least thought Was going to be groundbreaking back then. NewtonOS and Alpha and Copland, CORBA, PowerPC/PREP, OS/2, research projects like Sun's "Self", etc. it was all exciting stuff. Just very little of it went on to be used later.
For one thing, you'd have been much more plugged into the coming internet revolution broadly than any of the others. You'd also have been at least connected to the open source world although Sun resisted aspects of it in many ways.
They were also primarily in Silicon Valley unlike the others.
Early cell phones. PDA's like Palm. Printer market was hot. Businesses were networking their computers like crazy. The PC accessory market was hot. Video games like the Playstation were about to come out. Dial up online services and then ISP's. The web appeared.
Of course $40K then is $80K now, and you were working at 9-5 at BigCo, with a pension plan. Interest rates were 3-4x what they are now, the value of the house that you spent a couple of years salary on is probably going to quintuple, and the stock market runup over the next 30 years is going to be unreal.
Not counting the stock market plunge especially in tech in the dot-bomb era when there's a good change you'll also lose your tech job and very possibly be very underemployed for a few years. Of course if you hold on through that (and 2008), you'll come out well on the other side.
And if you were 20 in 91, you probably don't have a house in ten years in pricey (just not eye-watteringly so) SV 9 years later when the bottom falls out of the market.
Well, except pension, which were largely gutted in the private sector by 1991 (it was the plot of the 1987 movie Wall Street).
- Particularly interesting point in history for software (pre-Netscape!) - Build lots of experience before Google, Netflix, and FB are even born. - Incredible compounded returns in software stocks (and great returns in housing)
2021 is a great time to be a 20yr old software dev, but it's also a great time to be a 50yr old software dev who has 30 yrs of experience, stock market returns, and housing investment.
