In some ways better, in some ways worse. Most corporate environments not specifically geared to creating software (so, outside of places like Microsoft and Borland) were probably a lot more waterfall-y than today, and prone to doing things like using "lines of code written" as a KPI (even though experts knew even then that this was a bad idea). The tooling was a lot more primitive unless you were fortunate enough to work at a powerful, dedicated workstation like a Lisp Machine or a Rational R1000. For PCs and the like, IDEs existed but didn't have autocomplete or refactoring tools. Matter of fact they were kind of necessary unless you enjoyed the cycle of go into editor, change code, quit to DOS, run code, crash, quit to DOS (or reboot), fire up debugger, find problem, go into editor... Things like Turbo Pascal shortened that completely.

Thankfully, the much smaller size and scope of a typical software project partially offset the lack of sophisticated tooling.

In 1992, everybody knew that object-oriented programming, with languages like C++, was The Next Big Thing, but that future was not here yet and most everybody grovelled around in C or Pascal. This kind of thinking led to object-oriented bags on the side of even Fortran and COBOL.

Oddly enough, no-code tools did exist, but they were called CASE tools and were just as bogus then as today. GUI builders like Visual Basic hit the market.

On the upside, if you had a knack for computers it was easy to start a career in them. Programming was seen as a great career path for smart people who were "on the spectrum" (Asperger's syndrome was just barely entering public awareness). It was a lot more technical then than now so you really had to know how things worked at a low level. These days the "people persons" have really taken over and you really need to be one in order to thrive in the field.

Plus it was just a lot more fun then. People thought computers becoming mass-market devices would change the world for the better. Ads were for television and newspapers, not manipulative "tech" companies, and most programmers in the industry -- yes, even Microsoft, who weren't the evil empire yet in 1992, that would've been IBM -- really wanted to produce something useful, not just something that drives clicks and engagement. People also wanted to just mess around a whole lot more. Sometimes you'd hit the jackpot with your idea, but the important bit was getting it out there, not necessarily making millions with it. A college student named Linus Torvalds started writing an operating system just to see if he could. (Back then, operating systems were A Big Deal and could only be written by Real Programmers with decades of experience. Word was that Real Programmers working on Real Operating Systems would put the Linux source code up on a projector after hours, crack open a few beers, and have a laugh.)

It was a lot more "wild west" back then, but easier to find a niche, especially for individual programmers. Sometime in the late 90s this consultant douchebag for Microsoft decreed "beware a guy in a room" and so the focus from a management standpoint became "how to build the best software development hivemind" and we've been dealing with the effects of that since. That and the phenomenon of people who want to sit at the cool kids' table, but can't, so they take over the nerds' table, because better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.