Comment by rogerrogerr

7 hours ago

I'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?

At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.

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rogerrogerr

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cosmic_cheese  6 hours ago

For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.

I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.

I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.

  • NetOpWibby  3 hours ago

    I’m 38 and I worked for an IoT startup a decade ago until the CEO couldn’t pay us anymore (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).

    I’ve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I could’ve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC…what a time that must’ve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they don’t pay the bills yet but they’re the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.

    • PetitPrince  2 hours ago

      > (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).

      This is sad and kinda foolish but it's refreshing to hear money going in this direction instead of the other. I hope this CEO has a good life at least.

LVB  5 hours ago

If you expand your career scope to hardware and embedded software, your odds of having to be at a facility, or some customer site, and thus be by other people, rise substantially. I've had a number of jobs where it'd be quite impractical to be remote. e.g. actually building equipment in labs and installing it in machines, aircraft, etc. There are tons of examples. The obvious downside is that the options need to be near your home, or you move. Hence the various "hubs" that pop up for various expertise (SV obviously, but e.g. if you like aviation, Wichita is a good choice)

  • mrheosuper  1 hour ago

    This is why i pursuit embedded system. Writing code is 1 thing, seeing it manifest in physical world is just whole another thing.

smugglerFlynn  3 hours ago

I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.

Brains are weird.

  • cube00  3 hours ago

    > I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day

    While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.

    I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.

    • rowanG077  43 minutes ago

      Calling it something extremely negative like a cattle pen makes clear that you aren't even open to consider anything but the negatives.

    • Gibbon1  3 hours ago

      I work in a room that's 15X20 mostly by myself. At the rent my company is paying it's about $650/month.

      A SW guy in the bay area costs $15,000 a month. And the MBA's won't spring for even 50 square feet of space for them? Which would be what $300/month?

      I think you guys should just up and riot.

tonyedgecombe  1 hour ago

I don't know. I was watching a video about Bill Atkinson the other day (the guy behind the original Mac UI) and he worked from home because it was the only way he could get things done.

tannertech  5 hours ago

I did high level IT and general org management for 8 years without a single opportunity to see the office or people in person, before covid. Doesn't make it easy to manage a global team for sure.

steele  7 hours ago

Working with people in person died proportionally with corporate laptops featuring wireless telecom. Not because of the mobility, but more because of the collapse of the otherwise natural modes and boundaries.

  • larusso  6 hours ago

    Yeah. These days when the work machine actually stayed at work. Or that you had meetings with everybody in the room without in front of a laptop or mobile screen.

lapcat  1 hour ago

> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.

Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.