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.
I’ve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I could’ve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC…what a time that must’ve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they don’t pay the bills yet but they’re the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.
This is sad and kinda foolish but it's refreshing to hear money going in this direction instead of the other. I hope this CEO has a good life at least.
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.
While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.
I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.
A SW guy in the bay area costs $15,000 a month. And the MBA's won't spring for even 50 square feet of space for them? Which would be what $300/month?
I think you guys should just up and riot.
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 Andrej 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.