alt Hacker NewsI'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?
At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
Replies
If you expand your career scope to hardware and embedded software, your odds of having to be at a facility, or some customer site, and thus be by other people, rise substantially. I've had a number of jobs where it'd be quite impractical to be remote. e.g. actually building equipment in labs and installing it in machines, aircraft, etc. There are tons of examples. The obvious downside is that the options need to be near your home, or you move. Hence the various "hubs" that pop up for various expertise (SV obviously, but e.g. if you like aviation, Wichita is a good choice)
>And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
It is fun. It's popular to say office environment sucks and remote work is superior. and similar statements about long hours causing burnout instead of a 40/hr limit for better "work/life balance". But those depend on the personality AND the type of work they're doing.
If you're a cog-in-the-wheel code monkey working on JIRA tickets to move a "APPLY COUPON" field a few pixels on a pet food online store, that's going to push one to prefer remote working. On the other hand, if you're working on cutting edge stuff, that can push one to prefer working onsite.
The most fun I had working was 80 hours a week at the office back in the 1990s because I was working with the new thing called the World Wide Web. Fun to hash out ideas quickly with people in the room. No Zoom video conferencing needed. If you want to show them something, they just walk over and look at your screen. No screensharing needed.
The most burnout was working 40/hrs a week creating migration plans to upgrade database servers. I was remote but wasn't happy. The work was mind numbingly boring.
The personality and type-of-work being a huge factor is why a Andrew Karpathy (who's already a multimillionaire) publicly let it be known he wanted to be hired by a frontier lab. And he got his wish when Anthropic recently hired him. So why would a person who's already set for life because of previous stints at OpenAI & Tesla not just retire and relax in a hammock on a tropical island?!? Because he wants to get back in the game to work on the latest AI innovations as an insider instead of being an outsider using AI on a $200 month plan.
Unfortunately, 90% of devs probably never get to experience what working in an office for fun feels like.
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.
Brains are weird.
I did high level IT and general org management for 8 years without a single opportunity to see the office or people in person, before covid. Doesn't make it easy to manage a global team for sure.
Working with people in person died proportionally with corporate laptops featuring wireless telecom. Not because of the mobility, but more because of the collapse of the otherwise natural modes and boundaries.
It was. I think it could still be for some things.
It was.
For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.
I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.
I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.