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I kind of want to go back to 70's America and experience the tech life of a recently graduated student entering the workforce. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Intel, DAR

I kind of want to go back to 70's America and experience the tech life of a recently graduated student entering the workforce. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Intel, DARPA, Lockheed Martin SkunkWorks, IBM, HP, Boeing, Westinghouse, GE, etc. It was a different era.

ghaff 6y ago
In many cases, employment for life or at least decades--that was the plan in any case. (In some cases, more than others. For example, aerospace was notoriously cyclical and IBM had a near-death crisis.) And mostly solid middle-class compensation. I do know people at some of those companies who are (or were when they retired) employed for 20, 30, 40 years.
Animats 6y ago
Indeed. I visited most of those places in their prime. I saw the bean bag chairs and the original Alto at Xerox PARC, demoed by Alan Kay. Visited an Intel fab during the 1K to 4K DRAM transition. The designer of the x86 instruction set was in my college dorm. I met Bell Labs people in the early days of the Internet. Worked on some DARPA contracts. Knew people at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Almost went to work at IBM Almaden Research, which is a big glass building on a mountain, surrounded by parkland. I happened to be there the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was a small world. The cutting edge of computing technology was a few hundred people in the US in the early 1970s. Academic computer science departments were 10-30 people at CMU, MIT, Stanford, and a few other schools. It wasn't that hard to meet everybody. All these places were about making it work. Not about getting people to click on ads. Of course, many of us had to take a career detour though the Army. And I spent my first seven years working on operating system maintenance of a big mainframe OS. Theory and research came later.
- neilv 6y ago
  I'm always pleasantly surprised by the famous names talking on HN. I started many years later, but still get to meet and sometimes work with some of those people you mention. I have the impression that I caught the very tail end of a golden age. There are still companies making it work, rather than in the business of exploiting users/humanity, but I had a hard time finding many in my last job move. The closest I found was AWS, but I had some side concerns. I ended up instead picking a startup that was doing something constructive, and seemed like decent people, and one of the ways they got my attention was by touting in their initial contact that they don't do blockchain. :)

ghaff 6y ago

In many cases, employment for life or at least decades--that was the plan in any case. (In some cases, more than others. For example, aerospace was notoriously cyclical and IBM had a near-death crisis.) And mostly solid middle-class compensation. I do know people at some of those companies who are (or were when they retired) employed for 20, 30, 40 years.

Animats 6y ago

Indeed. I visited most of those places in their prime. I saw the bean bag chairs and the original Alto at Xerox PARC, demoed by Alan Kay. Visited an Intel fab during the 1K to 4K DRAM transition. The designer of the x86 instruction set was in my college dorm. I met Bell Labs people in the early days of the Internet. Worked on some DARPA contracts. Knew people at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Almost went to work at IBM Almaden Research, which is a big glass building on a mountain, surrounded by parkland. I happened to be there the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was a small world. The cutting edge of computing technology was a few hundred people in the US in the early 1970s. Academic computer science departments were 10-30 people at CMU, MIT, Stanford, and a few other schools. It wasn't that hard to meet everybody. All these places were about making it work. Not about getting people to click on ads. Of course, many of us had to take a career detour though the Army. And I spent my first seven years working on operating system maintenance of a big mainframe OS. Theory and research came later.

neilv 6y ago
I'm always pleasantly surprised by the famous names talking on HN. I started many years later, but still get to meet and sometimes work with some of those people you mention. I have the impression that I caught the very tail end of a golden age. There are still companies making it work, rather than in the business of exploiting users/humanity, but I had a hard time finding many in my last job move. The closest I found was AWS, but I had some side concerns. I ended up instead picking a startup that was doing something constructive, and seemed like decent people, and one of the ways they got my attention was by touting in their initial contact that they don't do blockchain. :)