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.
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.