used to prank each other, play space invaders or some other wacky computer game, actually work, take a long lunch break, play ping pong, talk on a telephone landline, listen to the radio and wait for that 10th caller to win the Guns n Roses album. Ahhh I miss those days.
Pretty sure everyone worked diligently all morning, then got drunk at lunch and mailed it in for the rest of the day. Working on that Penski file all afternoon!
I'm a millennial. I am curious what office life was like before the internet.
Were people more productive?
Were there fewer BS jobs that could be accomplished in three hours per day?
No, people were not more productive at work pre-internet. Instead of surfing the internet during downtime, we'd actually talk to each other. Joke around. Get to know people. And make sure to look busy when the boss came around.
There was downtime just the same. You just had different ways of pushing out the boredom.
You're a lot younger than you realize. The internet has been around since the 70s, and every business application that really needed it was already using it by the time it went consumer-friendly.
Additionally, OP doesn’t know what a millennial is if she think that you’re too young to know that there was still unconnected jobs 20ish years ago. Other than being a troll, you would have to be gen Z. Not a millenial. Millennials had plenty of access to internet, computers and even MMORPG’s.
The pre-internet era was only about 10 years. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s. It was the PC that really changed the nature of work in the office. In the 70s and prior there were two classes of office workers: Those that typed, filed, and answered the phone and those that did not. There was a lot more formal structure and division of labor. Most offices had someone whose only job was to copy stuff.
The internet did help break down that formal structure of office work. When I started working in the 1980s I wore a suit and tie every day. They we got business casual Friday, followed by business casual every day. Then casual every day and work-at-home Friday. And finally, just don't bother to come in at all.
In the space of 40 years we have gone from an office with formal rules and dress code to a world where everyone is their own completely self-contained office with a laptop and smart phone, working anywhere and anytime.
What office “workers” do now. Absolutely nothing of importance. The real workers don’t go to an office. Office “jobs” are for lazy people whom don’t want to really work.
I'd love to see the guy hammering a nail try to create a stored procedure that will get the right data for a web application that generates millions of dollars per month, map that data to a good model and display it in a way that makes sense so that the application continues to bring in millions per month. Or have that person figure out how to setup a good network security, or a list of other things. Oh, I can also swing a hammer, shingle a roof, poor concrete, whatever, been there and done that growing up/in college. That stuff isn't difficult, you can teach anyone to do some amount of grunt work in a day.
The job pays based on who is capable of doing it/willing to do it. There are probably a lot of people who would like my 'office job' but they are not capable of doing it because they don't know how, and would take way too long for them to learn how.
I worked in a cubicle farm where we would input mutual fund trades for Wells Fargo back in the early 90s. Our computers only had access to a very primitive DOS based data entry system. 90% of the time we were just punching in account numbers, number of mutual fund shares and total cash into the system from a printout that the managers would get from the customer facing side of the business. What was interesting was that mutual fund trading was one of the last to digitize and many mutual funds were traded using paper shares that were walked from one building to another in NYC.
Our work was so mind numbing that most of us could do it and talk to people in the other cubicle at the same time. As long as our manager wasn't walking the floor, we would just chit chat across our cubicles all day long. Smart phones did not exist and very few people even had cell phones (and those who did could not yet text message).
No one socialized with any of their co-workers outside of work. But we all knew just about everything about each other through the never ending chit chat. We knew what everyone did over the weekend, what their kids' ages were and what they liked to watch on TV, movies, restaurants, and so on.
When I started practicing law, Facebook did not exist. Most of the social media was pretty basic message boards that weren't very interesting. It would take about 10-20 minutes on the internet before you really just ran out of things to look at. In my early days practicing law, it was the same thing with chit chat taking up time, but you had to go to someone's office or hang out in the break room with someone.
I have worked in an office since the mid-70's. First, it took a lot longer to write, edit, and finalize documents. Often we would do three to five drafts with secretaries retyping each one. That would take a week or more. Second, doing research meant going to the library, often multiple libraries. Third, meetings. It took much longer to get to a meeting and hold it. Cars sucked and broke down a lot. And then you had to write up the meetings. Fourth, keeping up with the news via newspapers (Wall Street Journal) and technical magazines. And fifth, programming computers first on punch cards, then on interactive terminals, and finally on PC's/Mac's. Sixth - manual spreadsheets. One had to do those multiple times to make sure the columns and rows were correct. Seventh... a long noon run. I did that two times a week and was in the best shape ever. So there you go young'uns. Life in the seventies and eighties.
What office “workers” do now. Absolutely nothing of importance. The real workers don’t go to an office. Office “jobs” are for lazy people whom don’t want to really work.
I'd love to see the guy hammering a nail try to create a stored procedure that will get the right data for a web application that generates millions of dollars per month, map that data to a good model and display it in a way that makes sense so that the application continues to bring in millions per month. Or have that person figure out how to setup a good network security, or a list of other things. Oh, I can also swing a hammer, shingle a roof, poor concrete, whatever, been there and done that growing up/in college. That stuff isn't difficult, you can teach anyone to do some amount of grunt work in a day.
The job pays based on who is capable of doing it/willing to do it. There are probably a lot of people who would like my 'office job' but they are not capable of doing it because they don't know how, and would take way too long for them to learn how.
Give me a month of stack overflow and youtube and I’m sure I could get up to speed.
I got into sales in 1988. No computer, no cell phone. Left my apartment with a roll of quarters. Knew where every good pay phone was in my territory.
No one knew where I was going, where I was, when I'd be back. But, the level of micro management was much higher. Company had tons of reports to hand write every night with what you did. Think of a manual CRM system.
I had bosses actually claim computers would provide us with a 4 day work week instead of the 24-7 one we have.
I do think in general lots more wasted time now. Social media is junk. Tik Tok is a bunch of boring people convinced they're interesting. Twitter is a pointless argument. Even this site.. would love to have had detailed copies of Rodgers, Salazars, etc... training programs but after Summer of Malmo circa 2002 what good has come from this site?
I started working professionally in 1980. Engineering, having to deal with Southeast Asia manufacturing plants was rough. Had to stay late in the evening to 'talk' to them over this teletypwriter thing. You'd type in a question (no monitor, it appeared on paper as you typed) and then wait for the SEAsia engineer to respond. He'd start typing, very, very, very slowly and always made a mistake andthen you'd see the cursor backing up and X'ing out his mistake as they were not proficient in English or typing. Those sessions were like focking torture and you only did them when you absolutely had to. Otherwise we communicated with them through telex that we called "Twx" - (Send a twx to that guy NOW"). Got your response the 2nd day after the twx was sent. Imagine that being a regular part of your job.
You're a lot younger than you realize. The internet has been around since the 70s, and every business application that really needed it was already using it by the time it went consumer-friendly.
I got into sales in 1988. No computer, no cell phone. Left my apartment with a roll of quarters. Knew where every good pay phone was in my territory.
No one knew where I was going, where I was, when I'd be back. But, the level of micro management was much higher. Company had tons of reports to hand write every night with what you did. Think of a manual CRM system.
I had bosses actually claim computers would provide us with a 4 day work week instead of the 24-7 one we have.
I do think in general lots more wasted time now. Social media is junk. Tik Tok is a bunch of boring people convinced they're interesting. Twitter is a pointless argument. Even this site.. would love to have had detailed copies of Rodgers, Salazars, etc... training programs but after Summer of Malmo circa 2002 what good has come from this site?
1. Webb came back (WEBBS BACK BABY)
2. Mr Renato Canova
3. 800m training thread and running an 800m on pure hate
But actually though -- everything on here is trash, except for the weekly interesting new thread like this one, and Down goes the dow for the market-minded.