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.
I experienced these environments first hand, not at NeXT, but at NeXT adjacents like Apple, General Magic, Danger, Be, Eazel and other startups. What I miss is the shared vision and energy put into a project with a team of people who unify to accomplish a very difficult goal. You could seemingly tackle these projects with a small group and make great progress. We had building blocks, but many of the other fundamental pieces needed simply didn’t exist. You felt like you were constantly discovering something new.
Maybe this is how early Google people felt or how early OpenAI felt. I don’t know. They do have an embarrassment of riches, but I am sure they also felt they were doing great things.
I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.
My current job is back working on hardware products and the software that runs in them. It isn’t quite the same feel as 80s computer companies, but some of the joy is there.
I'm old enough to have experience in alot of great office environments (and some terrible ones too), the good for sure outweighs the bad!
Your comment about Amazon sucking resonated as I recently talked with them about a job, but walked away being super disinterested. I do not think this is an Amazon problem (fwiw, I worked at Microsoft for a super long time), I think it's a "problem" with the massive success of technology in the world.
Back in the day of NeXT, Be and early Apple, it was alot about building something cool and fun and a less about the huge money that could/would be made. Now the whole world relies on technology and there is so much money that the environment of a tech company is alot more about the business than it is the technology.
I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.
> I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.
I think this is how best to sum it up. We (tech workers) had agency back in the day as we were on the vanguard of something new and there were no best practices in how to manage us. These companies were run by and for tech workers. Today, you'd have all sorts of "stakeholders" telling us what to do. Product managers, various management and/or work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc), and top-down oversight.
At my previous job, I was literally dressed down for doing work on the side to resolve some technical debt that was hindering other work because it wasn't properly pointed. Didn't matter that I did it on my own time - showing initiative beyond the current story board was a no-no. How is one supposed to be happy in such an environment?
Um, all of the companies mentioned in this comment thread (with the exception of the original company mentioned, NeXT) received VC investment.
MBAs don't roll into startups to help get them off the ground. One of the good things about what YC has done to startup culture is remove the notion that engineers can't just run the company and do sales.
>I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.
Amazon is and always have been bean counters and toxic work culture, and any level, from warehouses to their devs. The rot starts with Bezos.
Lot's of good and bad stories, which are also good. Eazel and Be were quite different but both companies really got jammed up by Microsoft. Microsoft was constantly threatening other companies who wanted to work with us. Be actually ended up getting a settlement out of Microsoft a decade later. I am not sure why Eazel didn't pursue that. It could be because it wasn't in the DNA of Andy to litigate.
Eazel stories are very interesting because the company was trying to interact with the open source movement and this caused some friction several times. Looking back at some of those meetings, it is interesting to compare the youthful idealism of people like Miquel DeIcaza and Nate Friedman to the people they have become today.
The General Magic movie covers some things. It is worth a watch.
I am trying to think of something interesting that hasn't been mentioned before. One thing I keep thinking about, when comparing it to other companies I have been at, is that I really liked the founders and the people there. So much in fact, that I ended up working with subsets of them at other companies a few more times. There was definitely stress and overwork and unpleasant things like that, but I never ended up feeling abused or treated poorly in the ways I experienced at Apple, Amazon, other startups or DreamWorks actually.
I think at least in PhD positions and university research labs the environment is not as toxic and nowadays at least PhD students can experience something similar to the vibes of a team working together on some cool project.
I suspect massive companies like late stage GOOG and AMZN will always be dominated by an oppressive machine in the rank and file. It seems inevitable at this scale.
But the wonderful thing about these places is they can create/acquire/prop-up small subsidiaries. If they're self-aware enough to know the oppressive force at their size, they leave these offshoots alone (until too big, where the cycle repeats anyways). These are the parts where you can still experience the magic being discussed.
Presumably working at X Development (formerly Google X) still has a lot of this energy and autonomy.
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.
Bear in mind that there's a form of survivorship bias with these stories -- you only read about groundbreaking work by dedicated teams that changed the industry despite that always being the exception.
No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.
Start in 91. It was so much better than it is now. Editor, compiler, and a few books. You built everything : windowing, dbase/ndx support, printer drivers, keyboard handling. It was the best of times. Desqview was peak multitasking ha. Don’t let anyone lie to you it was great.
Desqview was an awesome early way to get online in one .. or even 4 .. sessions, and still be able connect to the local machine in another couple of sessions. It was truly great.
But if you look closely you can see this editor/compiler/references thing is reviving. Its just, the kids are telling the AI to edit/compile/reference.
The majority of jobs from the earlier computing era were doing mindless menial work like fixing the Y2K bug in 1000 COBOL systems doing boring stuff like accounting software.
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.
> (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.
Eh, there was a ton of frivolous work being done. That has long been the majority of jobs in the computer world.
For example, you could have been dealing with COBOL banking software. Or order management software. Or even spreadsheet software.
The difference being that all the tools were a lot worse and everything was built from the ground up so it took a lot longer.
Exciting stuff was about as common as it is today, and the reason you aren't doing exciting stuff today is likely because you know that 90% of those companies will end up failing and might not actually pay you. The most successful of those companies will likely do something like selling insurance adjustment software.
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)
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.
>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.
I cant see it. I was in the embedded dev world from the early 90s to mid 2000s before I moved into infrastructure architecture. The mostly homogeneous world we currently live in is just not even close to what we had in the 90s. At one point I had a Next Cube, an IBM RS/6000 (AIX 4.x Unix), a BeBox (BeOS), an OS/2 system (PPC), a Sun SparcStation and 2 x NT 3.x system (x86 and PPC) all sat in my office at the same time. The diversity of hardware and operating systems is just not comparable to today. It was an exciting time of rapid development and change and we were aware of it. Much different to what we have now where we just like to pretend we are in a time of rapid development and change but the reality is incremental change and small increments at that outside of AI
I havent found anything in the IT world to excite me for close to 20 years. The expanding core counts were interesting to start with but soon got boring. The introduction of ARM was hardly an excitement. RISC-V is dead as far as performance designs go though its a great micro controller arch. Software is abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer. There is almost nothing new and hasn't been for a long time
IBM Power is technically still around, albeit it's not quite as easy to find these days. I'm thinking of getting some kind of Power11 box, just to keep the monoculture out of my home lab for as long as possible.
I think the same thing, then I price a Power 11 (or Power 10) machine. Ouch. I even kinda liked AIX, even though it is definitely it's own thing. We had such hope for OpenPower but it never came to anything.
I'm at a letter agency, and the way we work with hands tied behind our backs reminds me of how we worked in the early 90s. It's still out there, you just have to find it.
> 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.
What's funny, is my assigned office is open plan with desks packed in, but the floor space is absolutely massive. The walkways are easily 20 feet wide, all the way around the place. There is such an incredible amount of open space that it would be trivial to give employees large workspaces.
The cubicle used to be the quintessential symbol of the oppressive and dreary nature of office work. Now you're romanticising it, which would have equally seemed absurd to people in the 90s laughing at Dilbert.
To be fair, most of the work environments people are romanticizing are not about the cubicles, but the startups. Smaller teams, kinda scrappy, but mission driven.
In a way, it hasn't changed a ton. Except, the startups now are not so scrappy, and the mission is pretty hotly debated (and for understandable reasons0.
Well, that or for this person the negatives outweigh the positives.
I have some good memories associated with open floor plan offices, but I totally get why others might not be so lucky. There were several days back then where the commotion surrounding me was too “loud” (e.g. people moving in my peripheral vision catching my attention) to shut out, even with good ANC headphones, and made it near impossible to work. I would’ve loved a cubicle or private office on days like that.
These days I work from home and don’t miss that aspect of modern offices a whole lot, even if they do enable the occasional serendipitous positive moments.
Some of my favorite memories of that time are firing up a multiplayer game of Doom on the university LAN, and then later at my first job playing Duke Nukem 3D at lunch time with my colleagues. A little later at another job playing 4 vs 4 player Age of Empires with my colleagues. We don't have that anymore, and hardly any games these days are LAN multiplayer as well.
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.
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.
I'm decades older, and it seems to have always been a rare thing to be part of a small team of talented people building something special and relevant to the future. These were and are exceptional places and that's arguably why they produced something we're talking about today.
Watch Office Space if you haven't already. That's what most of the irl white-collar existence really reflected throughout my career. And unless you actively pursued (and arguably created in part yourself by seeking out, showing up, and participating) something special even back then at a startup, you were very likely missing out then as much as now.
There are still people making things, irl even. I'd be surprised if Tenstorrent didn't have an environment like you're pining for, or Tilt Five.
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.
It ebbed and flowed with Bill. He would tackle super hard tasks at Apple or General Magic and isolate and hyper focus. I saw this from others at General Magic, Be, Apple, Danger, and even more current Amazon. You can even read about this in Soul of a Machine. I suppose the trait of someone on a critical path doing this has been going on forever.
Bill also had some different definitions of “getting stuff done”. At General Magic when others were driving super hard to get things done, he would make soup and ensure that everyone was eating and not totally driving themselves into the ground.
I'll have to rewatch, but I remember watching and debriefing with others and no one seemed like it misrepresented much. The movie created drama and tension and told a neat story. I do wish we had that cool electronic music playing in the background all the time. That might have helped us get more work done.
It was a really interesting group of people, with Pierre Omidyar and Tony Fadell going on to make large impacts in the tech world in different ways. Everyone there was really interesting and smart, even the ones who continued to build and work without all the publicity.
Another veteran of that era. I think their cult-like behaviors and death marches are falsely remembered as glorious mission. I was in two recognizable startups in that era and, 35 years later, still have disturbing dreams about one of them. What I really, truly miss is lone wolf software development, God bless it!
>At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses
You really don't. The world has gotten a lot worse in lots of ways when those days are compared to today, and the industry and job market for IT even more so.
Yeah. I think the death of "working with people in person" (for knowledge work) is going to be looked back at a turning point for a lot of reasons, same as the industrialization of manufacturing, probably.
I'm 43, but when I was your age I worked for a agency doing custom software development for non-software companies, in an office. I retrospectively think that could have been some of the most meaningful time that I spent in my career -- in terms of having impact on the real world that I can point to, and growth and social connections. Also, because the people who ran the company had little experience of the business world: almost no meetings, no product managers (we just talked directly to our customers). Just about 15 software devs, some UX folks and a minimum viable management layer (who was also sales).
It was mostly 1-2 people per project for the lifetime of the customer, so you had a lot of leeway over how you built software, as you were going to be probably maintaining it for the rest of your time at the company.
But at the time I hated it: meh pay, chaotic work environment, micro-management of your time, FILLING IN TIMESHEETS, an open-plan environment which was noisy and distracting, no structured knowledge sharing, CI, testing or other grown-up software practices. I was very unhappy there and don't want to over-romanticize it -- but I wouldn't be the person I am today without that experience.
> 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.
He was abusive before NeXT, after and sadly, almost to the day he died. As Andy Herzfeld says, he was the best possible boss and the worst possible boss. Working for Steve was exhilarating and deeply traumatizing.
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.
Sure, if you can find the opportunity and the means to do it.
My observation about being in Silicon Valley in the 80s/90s was the overall changing environment and ethos of the people there. I am sure there are going to be some massive simplifications here, so bear with me.
One is the overall environment back then. Things weren't cheap, but rent was much more affordable in relation to pay. NeXT paid well, you could rent in decent place in Burlingame, Foster City, Redwood City, etc. The commute down Seaport was fairly quick and traffic was light. Things seemed less crowded and frenetic and that made going into the office less of a chore. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is pretty intense. The tiny townhouse I bought in Cupertino near the current Apple campus was $150,000. It recently sold for 1.2 million. I haven't charted it, but the relation between compensation and housing costs have to be wildly out of proportion to when I bought the place. I was pulling a very good salary at the time and a lot of that money went into savings and investments. Now, I imagine a lot of that income would go into mortgages and expenses. Maybe current residents can comment.
The overall attitude seemed to be more about doing new and interesting things and maybe the money will follow. There wasn't as much of a go to Silicon Valley and get rich doing a startup. Maybe this was just an echo of some Berkeley hippie vibe that was present in a lot of the tech startups back then.
The new and interesting things also seemed more accessible. It seemed like there was less gatekeeping and more ways to get involved with "cool" stuff. Maybe this was also an echo of the Homebrew Computer club and early computer hacker ethos.
I do work person to person in a company, but I feel super lucky to have gotten this role. Really good in-person roles just seem super rare. The ones that I have been exposed to at Amazon, Google, Facebook and other current hiring centers just seem miserable to me. Please correct me if I am wrong and am missing the big picture.
It’s not the working with people that I mind
. It’s the lack of discipline in companies to spec anything out up front so your day is sprinkled with meetings and impromptu discussions absolutely murdering productivity . Then you have to work late just to get your work done. Maybe half days on site make more sense
Yeah, buddy. The structural collapse of workplace sociability is just one facet of the overall dismantling of long-term relational social contracts in favor of contingent, hyper-mobile labor arrangements.
In-person, copresent time spent with friends has _also_ collapsed by roughly 60% over the last two decades. The social fabric of our civilization is thinning out!
Have you seen _The Matrix_? That's pretty much where this is all headed: total corporate mediation of human experience and relationships. You are forced to passively contemplate as an audience member the very concepts of joy and creative agency that oyr current economic architecture denies you from living.
Your nostalgia is valid; you're being cheated! Swindled! Thieved blind!
Dense, multi-stranded local networks and informal support structures are an obstacle to the Capitalist imperative to enclose every non-monetized "commons" and turn every facet of human life into an immediate site of market extraction.
The only solution is engaging neighbors and co-workers in direct conversations to name our concrete, everyday grievances.
Directly! And not on moderated forums like these, where powerful techno-elitists can continue the project of mediating our reality. (Hi, Tom!)
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.