13 ms·

The real problem is complexity, which has gone exponential. When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys

The real problem is complexity, which has gone exponential. When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist. A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration. It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, "collaboration is not a force multiplier". Collaboration isn't a product or outcome. Ideally you'd have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it. Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn't to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents. It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers' productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don't send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You're setting your money on fire.

ulfw 3y ago
Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.
- pocketarc 3y ago
  This might also be country-specific. I didn’t even have internet at that point, let alone chat.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hermitdev 3y ago
  One of my funniest moments as an intern was helping one of my mentors accidentally delete her entire inbox. I can't even remember what we were trying to do with her inbox, but deleting the entire contents was not it. There was a moment of panic, then calm. She just told me: if it's important, they'll email me again. And we moved on and never spoke of it again.
eesmith 3y ago
My first email account was in 1989. That's also when I started doing online chat. > Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. Perhaps not to you, but for others it had been around time for some time, along with its problems. Microsoft, for example, distributed WinChat starting with Windows for Workgroups in 1992. Here's a description of events which took place at Microsoft no later than early 1993, as described in the 1996 book 'Showstopper! : the breakneckrace to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft', https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/page/284/mode/2up?q=winchat https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/pa... : ] WinChat was a variant on electronic mail; it allowed two or more people to type messages back and forth as if they spoke on the telephone. These “interactive” conversations were quite popular and illustrated the benefits of a computer network. It was important to test WinChat because NT was supposed to incorporate all Windows networking features. In his memo, Manheim was informing the team that they could use WinChat if they wanted. While his group was testing WinChat, others using it might also turn up problems. ] Manheim’s announcement bothered Cutler. He felt WinChat would distract people from bug fixing. He didn’t want it used. “This isn’t a fun app. It is a waste of time,” he wrote to Manheim. “VMS had this program 10 years ago. It was a waste of time then and it is a waste of time now. Anyone I see wasting their time with [WinChat] is apt to get some verbal abuse.” ] ... Using Winchat “is not a waste of time,” Manheim wrote, his anger rising. “It’s part of the product that will be used by the customers and if it’s trash we'll get shit for it. ] ... I have direct experience with this kind of application at Digital. It is easy to get everyone to sit around and type at each other rather than fixing the bugs they should be fixing. If I had my way we would not ship this app. But then we wouldn’t be compatible with Win 3.1 and we have to do that. The book also mentions email, ] It was a neat ploy, since colleagues mainly conversed via electronic mail, or e-mail. No matter Whitmer’s whereabouts, his e-mail address remained “Chuckwh.” At Microsoft, e-mail was the most trusted and intimate means of exchanging messages.
katzenversteher 3y ago
I often wonder if we really need(ed) to change everything to it's current state. What if we still had fax machines and photocopiers and non-networked IBM PCs in the office? I mean we could run a business like that in the 80s, why not now? It seems like we're in a race and constantly accelerate but does it make sense? Don't get me wrong, I understand that it makes economic sense to be faster and cheaper than the competition. I also don't mind many of the nice goodies we have nowadays and the progress in medicine etc.. However, I feel like working was more humanely paced back then. It's also possible that I'm just getting old and / or tired (I also suffer from depression and whatnot) which makes me think so fondly of the past. E.g. the company I'm working at now, they had folder filled with documentation and there were people actually thinking about how the things should work and how some meaningful innovation could be done. Nowadays documentation spread in different versions in numerous teams channels, sharepoint pages, jira, confluence, network shares, git repositories etc. it's really hard to find anything. Lot's of features are being added to the products but without knowing how they're actually being used by the customers, many of them being completely impractical or irrelevant in real life...
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  Anti-technologism would gladly welcome you. See the book Technological Slavery by Dr. Skrbina (available online).
- Mizoguchi 3y ago
  I have experienced exactly the opposite, I feel my work has become a lot easier today than two decades ago. Back in the day remote access to customer infrastructure was non existent, so you had to travel a lot and spend countless hours on the phone. Working with teams overseas was also challenging, there was no Teams, Zoom or Discord, the best you could hope for was Messenger (then Skype) or trying to get everyone on a call. But most of the stuff was done over email, which is a terrible tool for synchronous communications. Documentation has become easier to maintain as well. I agree that many companies are overwhelmed with technology and many of the processes have become redundant, but that's mostly due to poor design and implementation. A good document management system, good standards and training really improves documentation. We stopped using network shares for documentation about three years ago. All of our development,dms,collaboration and communication tools are on Azure. Not all are perfect and we miss some functionality by being locked out with MS but they all integrate pretty well for the most part. We recently got rid of the last few line phones in our offices and we are all now 100% on Teams for external communications as well. As for the human part, that's something really subjective. I keep my social life almost completely disconnected from work, and although I enjoy the monthly happy hour with colleagues and small talk in the office sometimes, I don't have any personal desire of having human interactions at work.
steve1977 3y ago
I often feel like IT has been taken over by corporate parasites, for the lack of a better word. Staff that is feeding and living off IT, but is not actually doing IT.
novok 3y ago
> Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, It's not to ship software or whatever else, it's to make money. Because without money, you don't have your pay or job and the major reason why you do your job is gone. Your perspective optimizes for your job and what you enjoy the most, but in most businesses, it's not just the factory and engineers that makes the business, and if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste. There are billions of lines of code out there that nobody gives a shit about because their associated business failed. The market doesn't reward the nicest team to work on, they reward winners. The nice team is just a tool to be more likely to win.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste So slow productivity in case the direction is wrong? Like he said, ideally, you package up the (correct) work task and hand it off to the worker.
- gmt2027 3y ago
  There's an undeniable existential crisis brewing within the tech industry. It's concerning to see how the pursuit of monetary gain seems to have eclipsed other, arguably more essential, objectives. Life's raison d'etre, after all, is not about amassing a surplus of glucose or oxygen. It's staggering how numerous high-profile tech firms are sitting on gargantuan cash reserves, with seemingly no coherent strategy on how to allocate these resources. In the meantime, employees bear the brunt through layoffs, while innovative competition gets steamrolled under the guise of threats. I'm of the belief that our technological endeavors should fundamentally aim to enhance the human experience in a long-lasting, sustainable manner. A deliberate and well-orchestrated transition to more efficient and equitable ways of operation should be the industry's primary focus, not just an afterthought.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Do you see a credible way to enforce this vision? With what resources, votes, arguments, etc.?
JohnFen 3y ago
> When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Interesting, because the simple life you describe was long in the rearview mirror to me by 2000. It does describe what things were like for me in the '80s, though. I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Indeed, it feels like early career in "joe's-soft". It still exists in 2023
- dahwolf 3y ago
  2000 is when I started my professional life. But I do have a living memory of the even simpler 90s and 80s :)
- Swizec 3y ago
  > I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience. Yep. I had this leave-me-alone experience in the late 2010's. Again in ~2015. Yet again in 2020. Actually I get this experience any time I join a new organization and am not The Guy for anything yet. I have no idea what's going on, so why would you bother _me_? You wouldn't. You'd let me get on with work. But as time passes, I know more and more about how things work, who knows what, where things are, what the code is doing, past and future decisions, ... suddenly I'm your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions. Of course you're gonna bother me!
  - sublinear 3y ago
    > your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions Just my opinion, but anyone who routinely relies on "quick answers" needs to be kicked in the shin and then fired without severance. They are the swampiest part of the swamp.
    - geraldhh 3y ago
      sure thing :) just that a vast majority of companies would go out of business
tiedieconderoga 3y ago
But if I did more work and less ticket-punching, my bar would look worse than my colleagues' bars in the annual layoff decision-making chart.
esafak 3y ago
I would say collaboration should be maximized inside the team, where latency is lowest and coherence is highest, and minimized outside it. This is the product-oriented organization philosophy, which aims to maximize communication efficiency. At the other end are functional organizations, which aim to maximize competency (specialization), and flexibility.
contravariant 3y ago
To be fair management not knowing what you were doing was probably not sustainable. Though strangely most additions have focused on giving management more control, not more understanding.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I think that comes in cycles. We have peak micro-managements doctrines, then "just look at the big picture" reaction, then it stagnates in the middle, to go back to one extreme or the other. I think the Agile trend will go away, and there's some companies out of it already, I just don't expect this current trend to last for a half-century either.
- __loam 3y ago
  Agile was developed to fix that, basically do the minimum viable number of meetings required to keep management in the loop while empowering engineers to make decisions about their own work. Didn't really work out that way though.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    I've worked on two teams that did Agile this way. Both were the most productive and impactful teams I've ever worked on. Unfortunately, part of those team's success was their ability to work mostly unblocked by the rest of the org. Once process had to accommodate other people's timelines and turn-around expectations, that all went out the window. Most organizations seem to much prefer optimizing for short-turn around time over sustained throughput.
dools 3y ago
I was on mIRC, ICQ and MSN all day with my friends in the late 90s-2000s so chat definitely existed!
- vram22 3y ago
  Which of those are still used a good amount, particularly the first two? And mIRC is a client for the IRC system, right?
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    Google The Fuck, Man!
    - vram22 3y ago
      Fuck off, dickhead. Not everything can be googled.
- whstl 3y ago
  Funny enough, until around 2015 I was constantly on chat with friends, at work, all day. Things still got done. After that things got a bit more asynchronous with social networks and the like.

ulfw 3y ago

Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.

pocketarc 3y ago
This might also be country-specific. I didn’t even have internet at that point, let alone chat.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hermitdev 3y ago
One of my funniest moments as an intern was helping one of my mentors accidentally delete her entire inbox. I can't even remember what we were trying to do with her inbox, but deleting the entire contents was not it. There was a moment of panic, then calm. She just told me: if it's important, they'll email me again. And we moved on and never spoke of it again.

eesmith 3y ago

My first email account was in 1989. That's also when I started doing online chat. > Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. Perhaps not to you, but for others it had been around time for some time, along with its problems. Microsoft, for example, distributed WinChat starting with Windows for Workgroups in 1992. Here's a description of events which took place at Microsoft no later than early 1993, as described in the 1996 book 'Showstopper! : the breakneckrace to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft', https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/page/284/mode/2up?q=winchat https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/pa... : ] WinChat was a variant on electronic mail; it allowed two or more people to type messages back and forth as if they spoke on the telephone. These “interactive” conversations were quite popular and illustrated the benefits of a computer network. It was important to test WinChat because NT was supposed to incorporate all Windows networking features. In his memo, Manheim was informing the team that they could use WinChat if they wanted. While his group was testing WinChat, others using it might also turn up problems. ] Manheim’s announcement bothered Cutler. He felt WinChat would distract people from bug fixing. He didn’t want it used. “This isn’t a fun app. It is a waste of time,” he wrote to Manheim. “VMS had this program 10 years ago. It was a waste of time then and it is a waste of time now. Anyone I see wasting their time with [WinChat] is apt to get some verbal abuse.” ] ... Using Winchat “is not a waste of time,” Manheim wrote, his anger rising. “It’s part of the product that will be used by the customers and if it’s trash we'll get shit for it. ] ... I have direct experience with this kind of application at Digital. It is easy to get everyone to sit around and type at each other rather than fixing the bugs they should be fixing. If I had my way we would not ship this app. But then we wouldn’t be compatible with Win 3.1 and we have to do that. The book also mentions email, ] It was a neat ploy, since colleagues mainly conversed via electronic mail, or e-mail. No matter Whitmer’s whereabouts, his e-mail address remained “Chuckwh.” At Microsoft, e-mail was the most trusted and intimate means of exchanging messages.

katzenversteher 3y ago

I often wonder if we really need(ed) to change everything to it's current state. What if we still had fax machines and photocopiers and non-networked IBM PCs in the office? I mean we could run a business like that in the 80s, why not now? It seems like we're in a race and constantly accelerate but does it make sense? Don't get me wrong, I understand that it makes economic sense to be faster and cheaper than the competition. I also don't mind many of the nice goodies we have nowadays and the progress in medicine etc.. However, I feel like working was more humanely paced back then. It's also possible that I'm just getting old and / or tired (I also suffer from depression and whatnot) which makes me think so fondly of the past. E.g. the company I'm working at now, they had folder filled with documentation and there were people actually thinking about how the things should work and how some meaningful innovation could be done. Nowadays documentation spread in different versions in numerous teams channels, sharepoint pages, jira, confluence, network shares, git repositories etc. it's really hard to find anything. Lot's of features are being added to the products but without knowing how they're actually being used by the customers, many of them being completely impractical or irrelevant in real life...

Aerbil313 3y ago
Anti-technologism would gladly welcome you. See the book Technological Slavery by Dr. Skrbina (available online).
Mizoguchi 3y ago
I have experienced exactly the opposite, I feel my work has become a lot easier today than two decades ago. Back in the day remote access to customer infrastructure was non existent, so you had to travel a lot and spend countless hours on the phone. Working with teams overseas was also challenging, there was no Teams, Zoom or Discord, the best you could hope for was Messenger (then Skype) or trying to get everyone on a call. But most of the stuff was done over email, which is a terrible tool for synchronous communications. Documentation has become easier to maintain as well. I agree that many companies are overwhelmed with technology and many of the processes have become redundant, but that's mostly due to poor design and implementation. A good document management system, good standards and training really improves documentation. We stopped using network shares for documentation about three years ago. All of our development,dms,collaboration and communication tools are on Azure. Not all are perfect and we miss some functionality by being locked out with MS but they all integrate pretty well for the most part. We recently got rid of the last few line phones in our offices and we are all now 100% on Teams for external communications as well. As for the human part, that's something really subjective. I keep my social life almost completely disconnected from work, and although I enjoy the monthly happy hour with colleagues and small talk in the office sometimes, I don't have any personal desire of having human interactions at work.

steve1977 3y ago

I often feel like IT has been taken over by corporate parasites, for the lack of a better word. Staff that is feeding and living off IT, but is not actually doing IT.

novok 3y ago

> Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, It's not to ship software or whatever else, it's to make money. Because without money, you don't have your pay or job and the major reason why you do your job is gone. Your perspective optimizes for your job and what you enjoy the most, but in most businesses, it's not just the factory and engineers that makes the business, and if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste. There are billions of lines of code out there that nobody gives a shit about because their associated business failed. The market doesn't reward the nicest team to work on, they reward winners. The nice team is just a tool to be more likely to win.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste So slow productivity in case the direction is wrong? Like he said, ideally, you package up the (correct) work task and hand it off to the worker.
gmt2027 3y ago
There's an undeniable existential crisis brewing within the tech industry. It's concerning to see how the pursuit of monetary gain seems to have eclipsed other, arguably more essential, objectives. Life's raison d'etre, after all, is not about amassing a surplus of glucose or oxygen. It's staggering how numerous high-profile tech firms are sitting on gargantuan cash reserves, with seemingly no coherent strategy on how to allocate these resources. In the meantime, employees bear the brunt through layoffs, while innovative competition gets steamrolled under the guise of threats. I'm of the belief that our technological endeavors should fundamentally aim to enhance the human experience in a long-lasting, sustainable manner. A deliberate and well-orchestrated transition to more efficient and equitable ways of operation should be the industry's primary focus, not just an afterthought.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Do you see a credible way to enforce this vision? With what resources, votes, arguments, etc.?

JohnFen 3y ago

> When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Interesting, because the simple life you describe was long in the rearview mirror to me by 2000. It does describe what things were like for me in the '80s, though. I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience.

hardware2win 3y ago
Indeed, it feels like early career in "joe's-soft". It still exists in 2023
dahwolf 3y ago
2000 is when I started my professional life. But I do have a living memory of the even simpler 90s and 80s :)
Swizec 3y ago
> I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience. Yep. I had this leave-me-alone experience in the late 2010's. Again in ~2015. Yet again in 2020. Actually I get this experience any time I join a new organization and am not The Guy for anything yet. I have no idea what's going on, so why would you bother _me_? You wouldn't. You'd let me get on with work. But as time passes, I know more and more about how things work, who knows what, where things are, what the code is doing, past and future decisions, ... suddenly I'm your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions. Of course you're gonna bother me!
- sublinear 3y ago
  > your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions Just my opinion, but anyone who routinely relies on "quick answers" needs to be kicked in the shin and then fired without severance. They are the swampiest part of the swamp.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    sure thing :) just that a vast majority of companies would go out of business

tiedieconderoga 3y ago

But if I did more work and less ticket-punching, my bar would look worse than my colleagues' bars in the annual layoff decision-making chart.

esafak 3y ago

I would say collaboration should be maximized inside the team, where latency is lowest and coherence is highest, and minimized outside it. This is the product-oriented organization philosophy, which aims to maximize communication efficiency. At the other end are functional organizations, which aim to maximize competency (specialization), and flexibility.

contravariant 3y ago

To be fair management not knowing what you were doing was probably not sustainable. Though strangely most additions have focused on giving management more control, not more understanding.

makeitdouble 3y ago
I think that comes in cycles. We have peak micro-managements doctrines, then "just look at the big picture" reaction, then it stagnates in the middle, to go back to one extreme or the other. I think the Agile trend will go away, and there's some companies out of it already, I just don't expect this current trend to last for a half-century either.
__loam 3y ago
Agile was developed to fix that, basically do the minimum viable number of meetings required to keep management in the loop while empowering engineers to make decisions about their own work. Didn't really work out that way though.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  I've worked on two teams that did Agile this way. Both were the most productive and impactful teams I've ever worked on. Unfortunately, part of those team's success was their ability to work mostly unblocked by the rest of the org. Once process had to accommodate other people's timelines and turn-around expectations, that all went out the window. Most organizations seem to much prefer optimizing for short-turn around time over sustained throughput.

dools 3y ago

I was on mIRC, ICQ and MSN all day with my friends in the late 90s-2000s so chat definitely existed!

vram22 3y ago
Which of those are still used a good amount, particularly the first two? And mIRC is a client for the IRC system, right?
- geraldhh 3y ago
  Google The Fuck, Man!
  - vram22 3y ago
    Fuck off, dickhead. Not everything can be googled.
whstl 3y ago
Funny enough, until around 2015 I was constantly on chat with friends, at work, all day. Things still got done. After that things got a bit more asynchronous with social networks and the like.