5 ms·

> It is unrealistic It was absolutely the norm in the '70 and '80 and before. How comes that technology improves and worker's rights regress?

BurningFrog 6y ago
One reason is we stopped building buildings. So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built. I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.
- bsder 6y ago
  > I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago. IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person per office up through 1990. One thing that people forget is that you had a land line phone. And you spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.
  - fzzzy 6y ago
    I absolutely love this little piece of flavor. It takes me right back to that time. I think this is an important point I haven't heard discussed before: The cell phone kind of enabled the open office explosion. That really explains a lot. Before if you needed to be reachable in a company, you needed a physical location from which to engage in phone calls.
  - WWLink 6y ago
    Programming teams almost certainly talked over IRC back then though?
    - radiator 6y ago
      Why would a programming team talk over IRC?
    - bsder 6y ago
      AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wait, why am I laughing? Oh, God, it's to keep from crying from how old I am ... In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a corporate email system. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And external network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just didn't happen. Programming teams were colocated or they didn't communicate. CVS was an advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of Research and Development (which were gold--and still are). A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 kilobytes) dedicated leased line was considered pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was godly and ferociously expensive. I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory. Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was just at the point where using ftp to pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you sent a physical letter because very few people in a university at the time had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988 /etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file every single host on the ARPAnet. The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was ENORMOUS.
      - binarysneaker 6y ago
        Thanks for the memories :)
- anthonybullard 6y ago
  This is a good point. As supply of commercial real estate is restricted, rents increase and the impetus to reduce sq footage per employee increases. Also, open offices have been around - and common - for a long time. They called them bullpens and engineers, reporters, stock traders, and many more low-level professionals worked that way. We think of office professionals because they are the ones movies get made about.
- alexashka 6y ago
  Building new towns and cities you mean right? There is a limit to the number of skyscrapers within a square mile before you've reached a dystopia. People confuse sane citizens not wanting a dystopian skyscraper-city with nimby-ism - wouldn't you rather drive with half the number of people on the roads? People who live somewhere feel the same way about their neighbourhood. Who's supposed to build new towns and cities? Gasp I'll say the forbidden word - government. Gasp the government can be a solution, not a source of problems? Yes my dear friend - you only need to implement a few laws, such as public hanging of corrupt politicians and businessmen. Gasp but aren't those the same people who decide the laws? No my dear friend, we the people decide, and we've decided to be a bunch of selfish, lazy, pathetic losers lately. Maybe this pandemic will be a wake-up call to some of you.
ghaff 6y ago
The "norm" pre-cubicle was more along the lines of some offices plus large open bullpens. But it did vary. Offices for at least most engineers were more common in the 70s/80s than today.
onemoresoop 6y ago
They pressed a lever to raise the extracted value from the workers is my guess
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
I did some googling and found this article (I don't care much for the layout, but stay with it for the pictures). It seems like the 70's you're thinking of is a blip in time, and we've instead regressed back to the open office plan of old. https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-design https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-desig...
wwweston 6y ago
This is a really good question. I don't think there are a lot of good normative answers -- I dislike open offices and cubes aren't much better (and at present, I'd especially have trouble regarding a management team that's still on board with them with either respect or trust). But I'd guess the descriptive answer is that the open office is essentially the new factory floor. Many information age jobs look "white collar" but at a certain level, they function and are viewed through a widget-factory management lens.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I think a lot if people don't realise that they are the new factory workers,only the production line is at their desks. It makes me laugh how some office people think they are very smart and often look down to those who don't work in an office.Ffs Jenny, you just sending emails to people all day long,you aren't doing rocket science here..
ThrowawayB7 6y ago
Microsoft used to have private offices as well that didn't take all that much seniority to get. Much like the FAANGs, it was a competitive place to get into and stay in, so productivity monitoring wasn't a thing.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  I remember they always pointed to private offices as one of their productivity boosters.
deadbunny 6y ago
Because - in the UK at least - unions have successfully been demonized and defanged over the last 40 years.

BurningFrog 6y ago

One reason is we stopped building buildings. So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built. I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.

bsder 6y ago
> I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago. IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person per office up through 1990. One thing that people forget is that you had a land line phone. And you spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.
- fzzzy 6y ago
  I absolutely love this little piece of flavor. It takes me right back to that time. I think this is an important point I haven't heard discussed before: The cell phone kind of enabled the open office explosion. That really explains a lot. Before if you needed to be reachable in a company, you needed a physical location from which to engage in phone calls.
- WWLink 6y ago
  Programming teams almost certainly talked over IRC back then though?
  - radiator 6y ago
    Why would a programming team talk over IRC?
  - bsder 6y ago
    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wait, why am I laughing? Oh, God, it's to keep from crying from how old I am ... In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a corporate email system. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And external network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just didn't happen. Programming teams were colocated or they didn't communicate. CVS was an advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of Research and Development (which were gold--and still are). A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 kilobytes) dedicated leased line was considered pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was godly and ferociously expensive. I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory. Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was just at the point where using ftp to pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you sent a physical letter because very few people in a university at the time had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988 /etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file every single host on the ARPAnet. The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was ENORMOUS.
    - binarysneaker 6y ago
      Thanks for the memories :)
anthonybullard 6y ago
This is a good point. As supply of commercial real estate is restricted, rents increase and the impetus to reduce sq footage per employee increases. Also, open offices have been around - and common - for a long time. They called them bullpens and engineers, reporters, stock traders, and many more low-level professionals worked that way. We think of office professionals because they are the ones movies get made about.
alexashka 6y ago
Building new towns and cities you mean right? There is a limit to the number of skyscrapers within a square mile before you've reached a dystopia. People confuse sane citizens not wanting a dystopian skyscraper-city with nimby-ism - wouldn't you rather drive with half the number of people on the roads? People who live somewhere feel the same way about their neighbourhood. Who's supposed to build new towns and cities? Gasp I'll say the forbidden word - government. Gasp the government can be a solution, not a source of problems? Yes my dear friend - you only need to implement a few laws, such as public hanging of corrupt politicians and businessmen. Gasp but aren't those the same people who decide the laws? No my dear friend, we the people decide, and we've decided to be a bunch of selfish, lazy, pathetic losers lately. Maybe this pandemic will be a wake-up call to some of you.

ghaff 6y ago

The "norm" pre-cubicle was more along the lines of some offices plus large open bullpens. But it did vary. Offices for at least most engineers were more common in the 70s/80s than today.

onemoresoop 6y ago

They pressed a lever to raise the extracted value from the workers is my guess

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago

I did some googling and found this article (I don't care much for the layout, but stay with it for the pictures). It seems like the 70's you're thinking of is a blip in time, and we've instead regressed back to the open office plan of old. https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-design https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-desig...

wwweston 6y ago

This is a really good question. I don't think there are a lot of good normative answers -- I dislike open offices and cubes aren't much better (and at present, I'd especially have trouble regarding a management team that's still on board with them with either respect or trust). But I'd guess the descriptive answer is that the open office is essentially the new factory floor. Many information age jobs look "white collar" but at a certain level, they function and are viewed through a widget-factory management lens.

cosmodisk 6y ago
I think a lot if people don't realise that they are the new factory workers,only the production line is at their desks. It makes me laugh how some office people think they are very smart and often look down to those who don't work in an office.Ffs Jenny, you just sending emails to people all day long,you aren't doing rocket science here..

ThrowawayB7 6y ago

Microsoft used to have private offices as well that didn't take all that much seniority to get. Much like the FAANGs, it was a competitive place to get into and stay in, so productivity monitoring wasn't a thing.

Ididntdothis 6y ago
I remember they always pointed to private offices as one of their productivity boosters.

deadbunny 6y ago

Because - in the UK at least - unions have successfully been demonized and defanged over the last 40 years.