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points by cosmic_cheese 4 days ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] FLHerne 3 days ago

Bear in mind that there's a form of survivorship bias with these stories -- you only read about groundbreaking work by dedicated teams that changed the industry despite that always being the exception.

No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.

[–] mmargerum 3 days ago

Start in 91. It was so much better than it is now. Editor, compiler, and a few books. You built everything : windowing, dbase/ndx support, printer drivers, keyboard handling. It was the best of times. Desqview was peak multitasking ha. Don’t let anyone lie to you it was great.

[–] rigonkulous 3 days ago

Desqview was an awesome early way to get online in one .. or even 4 .. sessions, and still be able connect to the local machine in another couple of sessions. It was truly great.

But if you look closely you can see this editor/compiler/references thing is reviving. Its just, the kids are telling the AI to edit/compile/reference.

[–] cogman10 3 days ago

Exactly.

The majority of jobs from the earlier computing era were doing mindless menial work like fixing the Y2K bug in 1000 COBOL systems doing boring stuff like accounting software.

[–] 0x445442 3 days ago

That was documented in the movie Office Space.

[–] NetOpWibby 4 days ago

I’m 38 and I worked for an IoT startup a decade ago until the CEO couldn’t pay us anymore (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).

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.

[–] PetitPrince 4 days ago

> (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).

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.

[–] NetOpWibby 3 days ago

He made his money in the dotcom boom so he's not totally without smarts. Haven't heard from him since though.

[–] cogman10 3 days ago

Eh, there was a ton of frivolous work being done. That has long been the majority of jobs in the computer world.

For example, you could have been dealing with COBOL banking software. Or order management software. Or even spreadsheet software.

The difference being that all the tools were a lot worse and everything was built from the ground up so it took a lot longer.

Exciting stuff was about as common as it is today, and the reason you aren't doing exciting stuff today is likely because you know that 90% of those companies will end up failing and might not actually pay you. The most successful of those companies will likely do something like selling insurance adjustment software.