5 ms·

Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardshi

by natly 4y ago

Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)

basisword 4y ago
I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.
- jihadjihad 4y ago
  It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.) [1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-pixar https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...
    - brycewray 4y ago
      In my case, it ended in 1994. The company where I worked at the time already had casual Fridays. Business casual, mind you; it was quite some years later before I got to see the whole jeans-and-sneakers casual Friday thing. During the summer of 1994, they went to business-casual-every-day. Then, as a morale booster (probably, as I look at it now, because the execs knew a 40% layoff was months away), the management decided at the end of summer to let us stick with that. The only time I wore a tie to work after that was on a day when I was going to have to leave early to go to a funeral.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        When I joined an east coast computer company in the mid-80s, ties all the time were already gone for a lot of engineering positions (though more senior engineers and managers still tended to wear them). Suits were pretty standard for marketing for marketing and other business roles. Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days. I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago. At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
        greedo 4y ago
        A company in my town still requires suit and tie for men, dresses or long skirts for women. If you leave your chair, you need to put your suit jacket on. You can take it off when sitting. The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
        corrral 4y ago
        Basically every low-wage service worker puts up with it. Not suits, but often-ugly required work uniforms. At least suits and dresses look good.
        greedo 4y ago
        Yup! I remember wearing nylon shirts and pants at McDonalds in the early 80's. Those were so much fun...
        brycewray 4y ago
        Even long after Ross Perot had sold EDS to General Motors, it was still frowned-upon for men to go to an EDS cafeteria without wearing their suit coats. Saw this in 1993 and, even as a lowly temp worker while between permanent gigs, I felt plenty of pressure to conform (and I did, because I wanted to be asked back for more work).
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I did that for the greater part of my early career. I think that banks in Manhattan may still have shirt-and-tie for engineers.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York. I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt. Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
    - hansworst 4y ago
      I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        Are you sure you aren't just unconsciously repeating the same prejudice, but from a different click? How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was. Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
      - janeerie 4y ago
        Plus the expense of maintaining two different wardrobes.
        corrral 4y ago
        The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress. A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on. We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
- corrral 4y ago
  A lot of what people complain about in white-collar offices have been problems people've complained about effectively since such offices started to become common (the 1950s). Including how little actual work is required for most companies to function, and how much of "working" is just presenteeism. And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.
iso1631 4y ago
Dilbert had his own desk, with his own stuff, he had a modicum of privacy from his colleagues The cube farm was hated at the time, but things only ever get worse if you work in an office.
- Loughla 4y ago
  “After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness." Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    Hot-take, it was never NOT cool to blast open offices. Unless you're in middle management.
    - iso1631 4y ago
      blast as in criticize I assume When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc. Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
    - greedo 4y ago
      I worked briefly for a transportation company helping with a migration to Solaris. I was the FNG, and everyone else was primarily Windows so I stuck out like a sore thumb. My manager (and his manager) were really nice but had experienced a bit of turnover. My first day showed why. All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen. No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot. I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...

by natly 4y ago

basisword 4y ago

I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.

jihadjihad 4y ago
It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.) [1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-pixar https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...
  - brycewray 4y ago
    In my case, it ended in 1994. The company where I worked at the time already had casual Fridays. Business casual, mind you; it was quite some years later before I got to see the whole jeans-and-sneakers casual Friday thing. During the summer of 1994, they went to business-casual-every-day. Then, as a morale booster (probably, as I look at it now, because the execs knew a 40% layoff was months away), the management decided at the end of summer to let us stick with that. The only time I wore a tie to work after that was on a day when I was going to have to leave early to go to a funeral.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      When I joined an east coast computer company in the mid-80s, ties all the time were already gone for a lot of engineering positions (though more senior engineers and managers still tended to wear them). Suits were pretty standard for marketing for marketing and other business roles. Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days. I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago. At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
      - greedo 4y ago
        A company in my town still requires suit and tie for men, dresses or long skirts for women. If you leave your chair, you need to put your suit jacket on. You can take it off when sitting. The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
        corrral 4y ago
        Basically every low-wage service worker puts up with it. Not suits, but often-ugly required work uniforms. At least suits and dresses look good.
        greedo 4y ago
        Yup! I remember wearing nylon shirts and pants at McDonalds in the early 80's. Those were so much fun...
        brycewray 4y ago
        Even long after Ross Perot had sold EDS to General Motors, it was still frowned-upon for men to go to an EDS cafeteria without wearing their suit coats. Saw this in 1993 and, even as a lowly temp worker while between permanent gigs, I felt plenty of pressure to conform (and I did, because I wanted to be asked back for more work).
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I did that for the greater part of my early career. I think that banks in Manhattan may still have shirt-and-tie for engineers.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York. I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt. Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
  - hansworst 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Are you sure you aren't just unconsciously repeating the same prejudice, but from a different click? How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was. Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
    - janeerie 4y ago
      Plus the expense of maintaining two different wardrobes.
      - corrral 4y ago
        The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress. A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on. We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
corrral 4y ago
A lot of what people complain about in white-collar offices have been problems people've complained about effectively since such offices started to become common (the 1950s). Including how little actual work is required for most companies to function, and how much of "working" is just presenteeism. And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.

iso1631 4y ago

Dilbert had his own desk, with his own stuff, he had a modicum of privacy from his colleagues The cube farm was hated at the time, but things only ever get worse if you work in an office.

Loughla 4y ago
“After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness." Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  Hot-take, it was never NOT cool to blast open offices. Unless you're in middle management.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    blast as in criticize I assume When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc. Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
  - greedo 4y ago
    I worked briefly for a transportation company helping with a migration to Solaris. I was the FNG, and everyone else was primarily Windows so I stuck out like a sore thumb. My manager (and his manager) were really nice but had experienced a bit of turnover. My first day showed why. All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen. No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot. I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...