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by blackwater 07/31/2022, 4:42pm PDT |
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A wave of remote work is washing over us
Previous waves:
1980 - 1990 : the "classic office": fluorescent lights, cubicles, formal clothes. Basically the Dilbert world. Everyone has a wired telephone on their desk for communication.
The golden age of keyboards that weren't shit. All computers (other than the cheapest of the cheap) come with mechanical switch keyboards with great build quality.
1990 - 2000 : the classic office but with casual clothes -- khakis at first, but later pretty much anything you wanted to wear. Wearing a t-shirt and jeans makes you a cool dude in the 90s, rather than a guy who just doesn't know how to dress.
The telephones on desks are still there, but they're mostly used by recruiters to cold-call engineers (LOL). The real action is happening over email.
Microsoft takes over the world, all the weird computers die out (mostly)
2000 - 2010 : the "googly office" with ballpits, foosball tables, beer kegs, and other stuff that was SeW wAcKy. Also "Interview 2.0", with interviews featuring burning ropes, 3 and 5 gallon jugs of water, and other "brain teasers"
Everyone has a cell phone, so only the stodgiest companies stick with landlines on desks. Some smaller companies give up hosting their own email and use gmail.
Kewl companies start giving out laptops rather than desktops near the end of this period
2010 - 2020 : the FaceBook-style "open office." In its purest form, you just sit at a table with no dividers. Everyone wears headphones, but everyone is distracted anyway. Some companies tiptoe towards open office with half-height cubicles rather than going full retard. A lot of companies move to (or are founded in) gentrifying urban areas, like Twitter, Uber, Salesforce, etc.
Apple laptops become cool as PC laptop build quality plunges into a toilet, never to recover (?)
2020 - ? : COVID panic, remote work becomes a moral necessity for a while. Every software company is forced to go remote for a while. Most times the management wants everyone to go back but they struggle to go through with it. The re-shitholization of the cities begins, especially in NYC and SF, and remote work is a nice safety valve.
Everyone piles into Zoom (a Chinese survelliance platform) and Slack. Some true unfortunates are forced to use Microsoft Teams. |
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