Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002 | Hacker News Reader

Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002

slate.com

158 pointsprawn138 comments

> One survey suggests that U.S. workers were logged into their employers’ networks 11 hours a day in 2021, as opposed to 8 hours a day before the pandemic.

A mentor of mine many years ago gave me the best advice: work sane hours, and live a life outside of that. He'd hold me accountable too, and say "It's 5:30, we got here at 9:00, we're going now" (half seriously).

The rules I work by:

1. Work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week.

2. When 1 isn't possible, work a 40 hour week.

3. When 2 isn't possible, average a 40 hour week per month.

4. When 3 isn't possible, talk to management about the problem and find a solution.

5. When 4 doesn't work, find a new job.

I have never needed to get to number 5, fortunately, but I hold myself accountable to do so. I have a family and they are my life. My job exists to support my life.

I’ve noticed that people tend to work about the same amount, some just do more hours. The 11-hours-per-day crowd spends much more time resting on Reddit / HN, because they haven’t rested enough at home.

I’ve learned it’s better to put in fewer hours filled with work, instead of more hours of semi-alt-tabbing around

This is surely speculation or a hunch rather than behavior you’ve actually noticed in others. For example what experience would give you real insight here?

This is the main reason to push for a 4 days work week, or less hours each day.

My brain is only good for about 5-6 hours of software development per day, and I don't think I'm unique.

So if 4 days means 4x10, I suspect I'd get less done overall. Not sure about 4x8.

I wonder if 6x6 would be a win though, not that I really want to work 6 days per week.

I think either 5x6 or 4x8 are the way to go.

Personally I would prefer 4x8, but my guess is that I would be more productive 5x6?

If somebody logs in 11 hours I’m presuming they’re flex timing, not actually working for 11 hours.

I clearly recall some California startup-minded engineers, pre-smart phones, who were shocked to see their European employers go home at 5pm or so. They gossiped about it and called them names for it behind their backs.

I bet Chinese people who have normalized the 996[1] work system also gossip and snicker about the "lazy" Americans who eat dinner at home and take two back-to-back days off every week.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

You'd bet wrong.

It's not normalized at all. Everyone who does it hates it. It's decried everywhere it's practiced, and there have been protests against it. It's also illegal under the Chinese constitution (but the government turns a blind eye to it due to the workaround that it's not officially "required" -- merely "encouraged" by companies).

Asians don't have a super power of working harder/longer than other races.

Apparently there is a major backlash against 996 as well, colloquially known as "let it rot." [1]

You can only be dealt a losing hand at life for so long before you actively give up or try to implement radical, often major societal, change. I think what's more troubling is how common this sentiment is across the world.

Somewhat related, but it reminds of a sketch on "I Think You Should Leave" [2] where the main character is happy when he thought he was about to be eaten by a fictional monster and wouldn't have to go to work. (whole sketch is good, along with the entire show, but have the timestamp to the quote)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1pwyCl5ymE#t=1m26s

California immigrant Chinese children had Saturday school all day, in addition to five days a week public school; that was before 2000.

A lot of startup-minded engineers are younger, fresh out of college with the single goal of excelling in their field. They work and work until one day they finally get tired of the grind and/or find life and responsibilities outside of work. You also have the workaholics, but that's another issue.

Don't forget to thank labor unions for getting that standardized 40 hour workweek in the first place :-)

As a dev in the 80s & 90s I found that it seemed to work well to state in a job interview that I expected to work normal business hours - BUT that when a deadline was imminent I could commit to the mega OT grind for a day or two or a few. Like (for example) Fri-Sat-Sun.

The key word here was "deadline": a shared understanding that this meant one of those customer deadlines - a big deliverable - that comes only a handful of times a year.

What's dev work like nowadays ? Does every week have a "big deadline" ?

> Does every week have a "big deadline" ?

Once my employer implemented Agile/Scrum, "big deadlines" seemed to occur much more frequently -- seemingly in two week intervals when sprints would end.

Now, I know many are foaming at the keyboard getting ready to state how my employer is not doing Agile/Scrum correctly. Those individuals are probably be correct, but that does not change my experiences nor many others' experiences.

I am not trying to shit on Agile either. I just noticed a strong change from how we did things pre-Agile and post-Agile. Every sprint is a new deadline. The overall quality of my work has suffered as a result too.

100%.

Scrum makes it incredibly easy to sneak in poor quality work and cover it up with a web of user stories and tasks.

The "board" takes the focus away from the product.

> The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands.

If your work requires a phone or computer, they should be providing a dedicated device. Then, turn off your work devices when you are done with work for the day. I know I didn’t invent this solution just now. Who are these people carrying around their work phone when they are not working or on call? If you are working at a place where this is the norm (I did, briefly) leave. It’s not worth it.

Depends on your position and motivation. I myself am always reachable and read my emails day and night. I enjoy being involved with my company just as others enjoy checking their personal emails every hour.

You are welcome to do as you please. As a collective, we need to acknowledge the burnout epidemic. People need to have the honest freedom to be offline, without any social or business pressure. There's more to life than emails and a corporation that is free to fire you at any point.

Not to mention that, this can translate into neglect of one's duties, such as one's duties toward family, duties that, broadly, have higher priority than the wants or even needs of an employer.

>>You are welcome to do as you please.

Personally, I wouldn't even go that far. Some choosing to give up their personal life in exchange for always-on work life push the needle into normalization for the rest of us that DON'T choose that.

You're suggesting that some people shouldn't be allowed to work harder than others?

Good question.

Not necessarily, but I think the crux of your question w/r/t my statement is the distinction between "workaholic" type behavior and "working harder".

Would I suggest that a company shouldn't ALLOW it's FT/exempt employees to work over, say, 45hrs/week? Hell yes! Mandated work-life balance sounds great.

Kind of like how social mores and corporate policies against supervisors having romantic relationships with their underlings protect not only employees who do not want to be pressured to date their managers, but also the colleagues of an employee who otherwise would try to get an edge by sleeping with the boss.

That’s fine you do you and all. But I hope everyone is aware that normalizing this behavior is toxic af.

This article did make me realize how chill my current boss and team are, I don’t give work a thought during off hours which is really nice.

It's not really "normalization". It's just I want to do better than everyone else so I make it a point to do more.

Doing more is rarely “doing better”. In fact it’s often worse.

> I enjoy being involved with my company...

And you're probably subconsciously aware that it's a dopamine trap[1]. Probably the greatest fallacy of our time is that just because you enjoy something equates with it's good for you (or "if it feels good do it").

I super enjoy a taco bell run at 11PM even after I've hit my TDEE. Notice how that sentence is almost identical in structure, underlying point, and absurdity, to the sentence "I enjoy checking my email at 11PM even after I've logged 8 hours that day".

[1]: https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-stop-checking-your-email/....

Great, now I have to carry around, manage, charge and use 2 different devices.

If you don't want to use your personal device for work, don't. But let's not pretend this is some great social, moral struggle against evil.

I use Android with work profile and just turn it off at the end of the day (actually have it automatically scheduled). Definitely took some discipline at first but now I'm really disconnected on days off.

Different profiles do you no good. Under US law, if there's an investigation against your employer, you might be required to hand over any device that you used to access your work email, or other data. That's why your work phone should be a separate device, not just a profile.

I doubt any search warrant will respect simple ownership. If the police deem something evidence then under US law you will basically never see it again...

Why would your phone be required if all they need to access is stuff on the mail server and company chats?

Well depends on your definition of evil. If it ever becomes the expectation for a 9-5 admin job that you have to reply to your boss when he sends an email at 2am, while you're asleep, I'd call that evil.

But that would be ok if the devices in question were work provided?

Because that's the difference here and it seems like the wrong thing to be arguing about...

The point is with two devices, you don't actually have to carry both around at the same time. You can leave your work device at work or in a drawer.

Or on the charger, killing two birds with one stone.

You're missing the broader point which is that employers, in general, do not have a claim on all of your time, and in general, there is no justification for the kind of on-call expectations some seem to have.

No, I am refuting the connection between these two points: employers, in general, do not have a claim on all of your time WHETHER THEY PROVIDE A DEVICE OR NOT.

It's no different to me whether my evening is interrupted via my personal device or a work one. People making a fuss over devices are missing the point.

The point is that the work device (whether it's a phone or laptop) can be turned off at the end of the day and stuck in a drawer to charge. It's not about the device, it's about not opening up a channel to your personal life to interruptions from work. One (but not the only) straightforward way to prevent this interruption is to physically separate devices. There are probably other ways.

ime ppl do the trade of beeing available most of the time in exchange for not having to be present all the time. but yes, this trade is not respected in a lot of places

As someone who lived and worked in the pre-cell phone era (and certainly well before the phone was always on you era), yes. You maybe weren't casually reachable off-hours but the trade was that you basically had to be by your landline and terminal during work hours without much interruption.

> Who are these people carrying around their work phone when they are not working or on call?

I assume people who want to get promoted. I can't say I really count myself among them; I thought the whole point of automation was that I wouldn't have to work unendingly, but that doesn't seem to be way things have worked out.

Carrying the work device? That’s the expectation where I work. The norm. What if something happens?

Mine still gets put down and ignored when I’m done my day.

People hate this.

People hate that I’ve disabled my notifications too, but when I ask “do I respond in a reasonable amount of time?” the answer is always “yes”.

Be the change you want to see, and all that, I guess.

I’ve had this discussion before, many times, but less directly. I’ve usually pointed to the 3 or 4 people in our team who have left over the past few years due to burnout, and mention that all of us are so well paid that any one of us could afford to take years off to find something less stressful if we wanted. My point being: I need a break. You can have some of me for a long time or most of me for a short time, and the more of me you ask for now the less you’ll have later. Hiring is expensive.

It's starting to feel like the point of automation was to turn a small group of people into anointed 24-hour career slaves who can dream of joining the 1% if they can keep up with the machine, and leave everybody else to scrape by with unstable, meaningless and often inhuman work but tons of media to consume.

Except I am willing to bet these sorts of people aren't promoted at a rate that is commensurate with their expectations.

This is a variation of what I might call the sycophant or nice guy paradox. The sycophant and the nice guy are desperate to be liked. They believe that if they prioritize pleasing people over the truth and what is morally right, they will be liked in return. Of course, that isn't what happens. No one respects the nice guy, and rightly so, because the nice guy is contemptible. He has essentially been shouting from the rooftops his lack of dignity and worth, his willingness to violate all true principles, and his readiness to comprise morally, for the sake of being liked (how lowly a person like that must be). The only people who are respected are the people who have staked themselves to the true and the good, not the Willy Lomans of the world. This, too, is similar to the hedonist: when pleasure becomes the purpose of one's actions and the things sought, they cease to be pleasurable.

When an employer sees that they can squeeze more work out of an employee for less money, then why bother paying them more? Do good work within the bounds of the contract. In general, if the employer wants more, he has got to pay more.

> This is a variation of what I might call the sycophant or nice guy paradox. The sycophant and the nice guy are desperate to be liked. They believe that if they prioritize pleasing people over the truth and what is morally right, they will be liked in return.

It's a huge stretch to conflate working longer hours with people who "prioritize pleasing people over the truth and what is morally right".

> When an employer sees that they can squeeze more work out of an employee for less money, then why bother paying them more?

The trick, of course, is to get a new, better job at a different company.

> The trick, of course, is to get a new, better job at a different company.

That's all very well, but if you continue to fail to set expectations at your new company, then the cycle will just continue.

> That's all very well, but if you continue to fail to set expectations at your new company, then the cycle will just continue.

It's not about failing to set expectations. It's about what your goal is in regards to work.

Some people just want to make a paycheck with minimal effort. No issue with that at all. Those people would be well served by "working their wage"/"quiet quitting". As long as they're performing to the minimum requirements, they should be able to have a nice life.

For other people, they want to get promoted as quickly as possible. The most efficient way to do that is to:

1. Do great at everything

2. Take on as much extra responsibility as possible (usually without pay/title, although often companies are more willing to grant titles than pay) while maintaining a high quality of work.

3. Every 2-4 years, get a new official job at a different company based on the actual work they were doing.

Is that for everyone? No.

Is that for some people? Yes.

Alternatively, some people enjoy their work and solving hard problems.

People also used to have lawns that they could tell the damn kids to get off of. At least we still have clouds to yell at.

With heatwaves, clouds aren't what they used to be, though. Clouds were much better back then, I tell you.

While I agree that workplaces should /offer/ a work phone if required - I would rather just have one. I don’t want to carry and manage two phones. I just set anything work related to not alert me after 5pm which works well.

I think many people would do fine without anything work related in their phones. I know I do. My phone has no work email, teams, or slack. I haven't received a work related phone call in probably about ten years now (except when interviewing), if I'm not online people will just wait until I'm back.

I can be reached during work hours when I'm in front of the computer. I can't be reached during a lunch break. This has worked fine for me.

In that case the workplace should just give a stipend. Honestly I think there may be legal reasons for doing so-- the last place I had that offered that was because HR REQUIRED it.

It would have been alien to my dad, who not only had a cell phone well before 2002, but also had pagers prior to that because being an anesthetist means you take call. The cell phone was better because it meant he didn't have to find a payphone when the pager alerted, especially if the cell phone was small enough to carry around as opposed to being a bag phone.

>>If your work requires a phone or computer, they should be providing a dedicated device

My old job offered a choice between work phone or $60/mo stipend (work laptop provided of course). My current job just assumes everyone use personal phone for free.

Really not a fan of that policy for MANY reasons. I've also refused to join it to our domain as that ALLOWS REMOTE DEVICE WIPE OF MY PERSONAL PHONE. Amazes me that so many consent to that.

However, in my current role, it's sort of a pick-your-battles thing right now.

I claim part of my phone bill on tax because I have slack installed on it. It's a legitimate work expense here in Australia

Yeah, I'm in US and I probably could also. I should look at that and I wonder if home internet is deductible for us with WFH.

That's what burner phones are for.

That's a good idea, I do have a couple old Androids.

I was using a google voice number for a while but that just got to be a hassle.

> Really not a fan of that policy for MANY reasons. I've also refused to join it to our domain as that ALLOWS REMOTE DEVICE WIPE OF MY PERSONAL PHONE. Amazes me that so many consent to that.

What MDM are they using? AFAIK Android and Apple both offer work-profile functionality and the MDM solution could be limited to the work profile.

That requires they bother...

Ime they just refuse and demand compliance from workers, because when you can avoid the cost why would you bother?

Sounds interesting, I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip!

While I'll glance at my work Slack after hours, the feature to mute notifications until tomorrow also works fine...

That said I'd agree with missing the feeling of being unreachable - it was a different feeling that you can't have anymore IMO.

Its not the same as turning off your phone - people didn't expect or have a way to reach you. Just wait until you came back home.

So if you mom was mad that you broke that window, you could effectively avoid the punishment for a few hours just by not showing up. (Of course, if you wait too much you could get the double punishment for this second offense)

What's barely believable in that article? From what I can see around myself, it's more or less the same except you can whatsapp someone instead of leaving a message on their voicemail.

Oh and it's a lot easier to sync up, no more wondering if they saw the message that you're at another bar, you send them your current GPS location.

> We would just walk to a movie theater and whatever was starting next, that’s what we’d see. It seems impossible to imagine.

Oh man, that takes me back. We had a dollar theater in my neighborhood growing up and my friends and I would just see whatever was showing. I saw sooo many movies as a kid, many of which would probably have been considered inappropriate for my age these days.

Even as I got older, there were times I ended up seeing unexpected and strange movies because the showing we had gone to see was sold out.

These days pre-purchasing preselected seats really takes the spontaneity out of the equation.

Italy: newspapers used to have a page or two with the movies and times at each theater of the city for today and the next few days, plus prices. You could always find a friend with a newspaper, or somebody would buy one to check the listings. Then they started to give away smaller newspapers for free at subway stations. I can't remember if they had movie listings but the sales of established newspapers took a hit. It was the time when everybody started to have a phone on their pocket or in hand to play games.

We got hold of the phone number of a free taxi phone at the cinema in my town, and instead of reading the paper to see what was showing when, we'd ring the taxi phone and ask people what was listed on the "now showing" board, people were surprisingly happy to recite it to us.

I'm old enough to remember what I did in 2002, online games and offline games, ICQ and forums instead of social media. So, not much difference

Yeah it really wasn't so far off now. Most of the people I knew had a cell phone (I had gotten it in '99) so there was definitely communication possible anywhere for the most part. In 2002 I was in a student apartment with decent wired internet, a Nokia cell phone (no texting plan), and was in touch with many people via AIM.

The mid 90's is probably more the time to blow the current generation's mind because that's when many households didn't have internet and virtually nobody under 18 had a cell phone.

Yeah. I'd put the date about ten years earlier. You're pre-Web. You may have a cell phone (as an adult) but you probably don't carry it around with you all the time. You may well have a home computer but any dial-up connection is probably a BBS (commercial or otherwise) rather than internet. You probably have email and most of your friends probably do as well.

Early 90s is probably when things start to look fairly alien from a technology and communications perspective. There are probably a lot of hints about what's coming but they're mostly not really realized and certainly not mainstream.

>virtually nobody under 18 had a cell phone.

I had a StarTAC but nobody I knew had a cellphone but calling their home wasn't all that fun you'd probably get "why are you calling me?".

I liked a cute girl who worked in a bar. So I set my Windows computer to delay sending a fax but I picked my phone. I knew when I'd be at the bar and I got a call and answered it to EEeeeeeeeeeeee pretending I was Mr. Important. She didn't fall for it. lmao

Exactly. Download mp3s, chat with friends on ICQ/AOL IM, forums of various interests, online dating. There were even real audio podcasts basically at this time but they just weren't called podcasts.

The only thing I can't remember is if I would have downloaded movies or not.

The ipod was released October 23, 2001 lol.

This article is backwards. It is shocking to me how much things have stagnated.

Compare 1982 to 2002.

Limewire was released May 2000, and Kazaa was released Mar 2001, and I am pretty sure I had a cable broadband modem in 2001, so movies were most likely available for download by 2002.

In 2002, I was in a Team Fortress Classic clan. Idling in IRC was a thing. ICQ, hammering F5 on forums, all not much different from today.

This pretty much. Skateboarding, rollerskating, D&D with friends during the week-ends and then coding and online games on the big bad Internet.

In the early nineties it was a bit different: no Internet for me yet but I had already had a modem and I'd use BBSes. No cellphone yet but two of my friends already had pagers so we could "ping" them in real life at anytime and they'd call back on the landline phone whenever they'd be near a telephone booth. It wasn't crazy expensive: they were buying these on little jobs you'd do after school as a teenager.

In my case it's the early to mid-eighties that were way less connected: no BBS yet for me. We'd be riding our BMX 2000 (wasn't skating yet nor playing D&D yet) and playing our 8-bit console. And learning to code thanks to books and printed magazines. Landline phones, typically still with a cord but friends didn't have pagers yet.

In case of real emergencies people would drive to were they thought people were. Sometimes long rides. When someone of my family was killed in a road accident in 1986, my grandfather and one of my father's friend had to drive two hours to go announce my father the news: our week-end chalet in the Ardennes didn't have neither neighbors nor a landline phone.

How universal is it to get work emails in the evening that you have to respond to?

I run a small agency and we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency. It seems pretty horrific to me (outside of high-powered corporate roles where you get rewarded enough to make up for it).

And is this regional? i.e. maybe US and East Asia but not Europe so much?

I’ve worked one tech company in my life where this was an expected norm (a fruity place in Cupertino), and it was pretty miserable. There are plenty of places where you leave work and you’re done until the next day. Highly recommend finding one.

> we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency.

Everything seems to be an "emergency" now. Which means you need to take the time to log back into work, figure out what is going on and then find out it could have waited until the next work day. Repeat the cycle.

Legitimately, though. It does seem like many individuals are no longer able to really differentiate between emergency, important, and standard. The number of e-mails I get with high importance marked now is sort of shocking.

Everything needs to be done immediately. Not today, not this week. Right now, in this moment.

Instant gratification is killing us, I think.

Europe here. I check my mail manually, I disabled push and notifications or my life would be a hell of automated messages of a number of services. I check my mail a few times per day, delete useless stuff, reply to the few real messages. Costumers write me on slack. If it is urgent they use WhatsApp. If it is really urgent they call me. It doesn't happen every year.

In the 1980s I worked for an arcade company as in the guy who collected the coins not manufacturer or developers of them. We also had some grey poker (not legal not illegal). I was on call one week each month at the time the pager was huge. Literally paged as in the person called a number and then that service called the page with the number saying it in a voice call over a radio.

Then early 2000s I worked for government lottery and was on call one week out of three. It was a cellphone I think we got voice or text but then later email.

Then a tech at a casino where I had a cellphone with email and it was constantly going off. So life was good up until about 2005.

For government lottery I got paid three hours for any time up to three hours. Then after that it was regular pay. So if I got the job done in 30 min I made money if not it was just a regular pay.

I can’t get some of my friends and acquaintances to finish a sentence if their phone rings. They will dump out of the middle of telling a story to two or three people in order to talk to someone who isn’t even hear. I find it obnoxiously rude and they think it’s perfectly normal.

Let it go to voice mail. If they really wanted to talk to you they’d be here listening to the story too.

This is hardly new though. Even after answering machines became a thing, there were a lot of people who could not not answer a ringing landline. In fairness, a lot of people were probably conditioned pre-answering machine to phone calls being a less common thing and that if you didn't pick up, who knows who called and why?

> In fairness, a lot of people were probably conditioned pre-answering machine to phone calls being a less common thing and that if you didn't pick up, who knows who called and why?

I grew up during this transition, phone calls to our family's landline were considered important so you'd always pick up when it rang.

Fast forward to nowadays: I actively ignore phone calls. I don't live in the US so never had the nightmarish experience of robocalls all the time, and still if some number which is not my immediate family's or close friend's calls me without a previous heads-up (can be just a message "can I call you around time X?") I ignore it.

I don't know what it is about phone calls but they became increasingly disruptive, even without robocalls there are a lot of marketing calls, phone companies trying to upsell me, some random recruiter trying to reach me during working hours. Picking up the call takes me to a different universe, I simply don't want to be interrupted like that.

The look of horror on people’s faces when they realize I’m going to keep talking to them instead of stopping and answering my phone was probably the worst part.

Yes, you’re here, they are not. They can wait.

Europe (Netherlands) here, where I've worked so far, you would not expect a mail to be read and answered out of (individual) work hours. Only if things went south and someone was needed (because the company was too small to make all expertise fully redundant and sync up holidays), after a lot of hesitation, help would be asked (!).

Now I'm running a startup with 1 cofounder, we Slack also in evenings and weekend, but there's no real expectations there either. We just both prefer to be flexible (wrt work-life and life-work) and put in a bit of effort right where it is needed instead of hammering all the time.

"we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency."

Where you get to define what is an emergency?

A service degradation sufficiently severe that tomorrow/Monday morning we'll have developers taken away from whatever they are working on to diagnose and fix the problem — whether that's a proper fix, an automated workaround, or a change in the monitoring system to reduce the severity of this problem from 'emergency'.

I took on a role with lots of outage alerts happening, at least a couple of times a week. I think my predecessor liked to play hero, by reporting every day or two what he'd 'fixed' (restarted) the previous evening/night. We had almost all of them fixed within a couple of months.

I work for a large US Corp in the US. I close my laptop at 430-5 and don't open it again until the next day. I don't have work email on my phone. Most of my friends who work for corps are the same. So I dunno. We are all on our 40s so maybe younger folks in their 20s are more connected or something but I don't think so.

> 7th Heaven. I didn’t like it. It was just that I came home at a regular time, and that show just seemed to be on, and I watched it because that’s what you do

This is a big reason why I barely watch any new TV shows these days. Back then, you'd turn the TV on and there would be something, and you'd just watch it even if it was midway through. Today, there's just an endless grid of thumbnails, forcing you to expend mental effort to figure out from the tiny image and 3 line synopsis if it's worth trying.

> 3 line synopsis if it's worth trying.

That was a good thing. Now Netflix--at least for me--doesn't even give me that for most series/movies; it only says crap like "This movie was the most watched in US this month" or something useless like that.

I'm not that inclined to especially romanticize channel-surfing.

I can't find the link anymore, but this reminds me of the guy who set up a Raspberry Pi to continuously play random Simpsons episodes as a kind of TV channel to watch when you cant decide what to watch.

Fun fact I still leave at 5pm. People mostly not work outside work times except if it is planned or you are on call.

Not in Europe no Sir ;)

In Spain we finish at 6pm.

Some people even work until like 7pm.

Sure but you guys take daily hour+ long afternoon breaks and relatively longer lunches no?

At least that appeared to be the case when there on my honeymoon :).

Not really, I think the shops close during the day, but those guys work until 9pm.

I mean it's 9am-6pm with an hour for lunch so it's still an 8-hour day if you don't count the lunch hour as working. But if you are working in the office it still kinda sucks as you can't really do much in that time.

Spain is also in the "wrong" timezone. It's directly south of Britain and should fit in the +0000 timezone, but politics and history put it in the same timezone as France (which should also be in +0000) and Germany.

That's true but most people still start work at 9am though.

I think it used to be more common to start at 10am, but not anymore.

No, only shops do this. Office employees typically don't take an afternoon break.

Yep, I do my 8 hours then stop. If something's on fire in prod and I'm the best person to help, I'll respond.

But I'm a firm believer that having to put out fires outside of business hours is a sign of a fragile system.

And anyway, I learned my lesson about the unidirectional flow of loyalty in most businesses at a previous company.

I gave them untold unpaid hours outside of normal work time for years. About a decade of doing so when the next paragraph kicks in.

I unexpectedly got sole custody of my five children, and wanted to work from home when they were sick, as my sick leave had been quickly exhausted because, well, five children, and sick leave provisions in my country were minuscule - 5 days a year, recently changed to 10 days a year to the disgust of the business community.

After all, I wasn't sick, and could still write code while looking after my sprogs instead of not writing code and using my annual leave. Shit, when I was taking leave when they were sick, I was still writing code ( in between nursing duties) for my company because loyalty and my desire to deliver... .

...So it made sense to me, instead of me not working at all, I'd work from home on those occasions, knowing it wasn't ideal, but it was far more productive than not working, and I expected the company would understand and support me.

After all, how much had I done for the company for free in my personal time in the years prior? I'd had years of late night firefighting, and regular video calls in my evening with product owners 11-13 hours behind me.

An occasional bit of flexibility from the company was a fair and decent recognition of my years of flexibility and unpaid labour, I thought.

Haha, no, I got a verbal bollocking/warning.

(This was pre-pandemic, naturally.)

So yeah, these days, I give you 8 hours, and I'll do my damnedest to make sure you don't need me outside of those 8.

The truly funny one not dug into much here is dating. I have had younger colleagues flat out tell me we are obviously lying about how people used to meet as to them it sounds insane. For many these days the idea of doing something without vetting it online first is inconceivable.

I still only meet people in person and do pretty well - there is a big backlash against apps now - although I will admit that it has become the standard. But people are definitely tired of them.

Seems like big group activities are the new dating game (and friend game) and I am very much here for it

"Did you see [show] on TV last night? lol" was a common thing to hear when back at work the next day.

For work if you got a call at home from work it was a shock. There was no way anyone from work would need to call you at home.

As a teen in the mid 1980s I did have to carry a pager the size of a paperback book. But it was nowhere near as bad as now or when cellphones and mobile email got going. First it was Nokia 3310s, then BlackBerry, then later iPhones.

For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really.

Socially for me the Internet came around just in time. I wasn't a bar hopper or into sports or really anything social. Suddenly in 1993 I could talk to the world it was amazing if not expensive at 60 hours a month. But companies took another decade to catch on. Cellphones were still basic just a phone and expensive to use and only a few people had them.

Friend of mine held out longer than most on cell. Instead he had a pager. Once paged he would turn on his ham radio so we could go and find him.

> For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really.

I was in my early teens when cellphones became universal, and I remember thinking of how so many movie plots were going to become unusable or require an implausible amount of battery deaths to be added. Non-supernatural horrors or thrillers, comedies of errors, a lot of crime stories...

> We would just walk to a movie theater and whatever was starting next, that’s what we’d see. It seems impossible to imagine.

Only impossible because it sounds fake or at least over-romanticized. 2002 was not the dark ages lol

I’m from the same age group and local magazines, newspapers, leaflets etc. were carrying the cinema schedule (well they actually still do in some places)

2002 is post-dotcom era and I'm pretty sure I could get movie showtimes by dialing a phone number long before that. (Or looking in a newspaper as you say.) Go back and information generally was a lot harder to get but I'm not sure the time of movies is a great example.

Heck, even in 2002 you didnt need to use your phone for actual calling anymore. Back then you could already (for years at that point!) ask for the local showtimes via SMS codes or look them up on WAP/i-mode info pages. Or was that not a thing in the US?

WAP was a thing in the US but I'd say that--in general--it wasn't a super-mainstream thing around 2000. I'm not sure I ever used it personally. The future was definitely unevenly distributed with respect to mobile in the US until relatively latterly.

> Now, if someone calls me on the phone, I’m like, “How violent of you to call me.”

I am twenty years their junior, but good god that made me feel old. Is it primarily how rare phone calls are (albeit coupled with lack of body-language and real-time decision-making, but still) that makes so many young people in their twenties fear them?

I'm in my mid 30s and I don't fear them. I dislike them. I don't want to be interrupted from whatever I am doing to answer a phone call that could have been a message. I don't care about your body language or the need for real-time decision making unless it's something truly important to me, like a family matter.

I understand that feeling. Phone calls aren’t the first order of communication anymore so when it does happen it’s either a telemarketer, scam call or potentially someone with bad news.

Knocks at the door are even scarier.

It's just the irresistibly impending and involuntary socialization that's scary.

I assume it's an evolutionary thing, like dogs being afraid of thunder.

I'd count myself as being a young person in the smartphone era, every job I have had has been post ubiquitous mobile data, and I don't identify with this "work emails" thing at all.

I don't know if I got a work e-mail after hours. Until 2020 there would have been no way for me to even know, my computer was at the office. After 2020 I closed it at 5/6/whenever the end of office hours was.

People talk about doing crazy hours being the way to be promoted. In my experience it is exactly the opposite, doing that establishes that you are desperate and will do anything for a wage. It's like being overly needy in dating or a relationship, people take that as an indication that something is wrong with you.

> Sally: You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.

That wasn't 2002. Not in the UK any way. Pre 2000 maybe.

Mobile phones & texting became much more common earlier in Europe versus the US.

I worked in mobile infrastructure at Motorola in 2002. The entire world had more advanced mobile systems than the US. We’d be selling/installing our best stuff in Africa & Asia, while American operators just wanted replacement parts for their existing tech.

The landline infrastructure in the US was so good, people didn’t want to let go of it. I don’t think people really changed their minds until the iPhone came out.

> The landline infrastructure in the US was so good, people didn’t want to let go of it. I don’t think people really changed their minds until the iPhone came out.

Sorry, but this is simply wrong. I was did some consulting work for a company that had a big pay phone business. I saw their financials. They'd already lost much of their business by the late 1990s due to cellphones. Their main customers by then were low income or had bad credit and thus couldn't get a cell.

> due to cellphones

Or maybe due to cellphones, email, IRC, AOL, ICQ and whatever else were there?

It would be kinda strange to "let's meet in 15 minutes at the corner of ... / AFK" and then find a payphone to.. tell exactly that again?

It's just a bad article. Mobile phones were almost universal by 2002 in the US. When I was on the job market visiting a university in January 2002, there was someone that still didn't have a cellphone, and it was so rare by that point that it was a topic of discussion. Even in sparsely-populated western North Dakota and South Dakota, most people had a mobile phone by then.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "had a mobile phone." I had one--probably from sometime in the 90s. But until I got a Treo in 2006, it was something I only used for specific purposes like if I was running an activity and I wanted people to be able to reach me. It wasn't something I carried with me.

(But, certainly, by the early 2000s a fair number of people expected others to be immediately reachable by cell.)

Nobody I knew had phones until later on in highschool and for me that was about 2005. Part of that may be age but I clearly remember my parents (and none of their friends) or my extended family having phones either. I was the first to get one and it felt like a privilige.

This is the bay area peninsula

Wow, was the US really that far behind? Or is it possible you are misremembering a bit? Here in europe I was already regularely texting way back in 1998 on my trusty Alcatel.

I am surprised how much of this hit home! I would have assumed that although the same age as these people that I’d somehow not be able to relate since I was an overworking software engineer at the time.

Things like finishing a Masters degree after work, having places to go where you know you’d run into people you knew, physical media all rung true.

One thing that seemed to be missed though was that the downside of not having the technology to enable work from home meant the development of the “late at the office” culture.

Think of the xkcd comic with the sword fighting while compiling. Those sorts of silly things were routine after, say, 6pm in an office.

Now if you need to work after hours you do it from home, where your day may have started anyway. Twenty years ago you and some colleagues would stay in the office, order some food, play some music on someone’s speakers, take occasional breaks for a game or even a nap and keep plowing through work until 11pm or even later.

Also “on call” was still a thing, but it meant a phone call or page and then you physically go to the office to solve the problem!

At least in North America and Europe cellphones started getting traction in the early nineteens and were pretty widespread in 2002.

2002?

Cellphones were common in Europe since around 1996.

As if a) we didn’t have parents who worked and observed their behaviours, b) don’t work jobs where it’s normal to not be contacted after hours

> Can a modern young person ever understand what it was like to simply watch whatever happened to be on television

The insults just keep coming.

And linking to a survey taken during lockdown and many more people WFH with less to do after work? Pretty trash article overall

I get where you're coming from, but I also have trouble understanding this response people have to feel like any discussion of generational trends is somehow an insult to themselves and their generation. Like those articles that are like "millennials aren't buying houses," why does everyone get so defensive about those as though they're being blamed for something? It's just a dry description of economic trends.

Seeing the way things were from the outside, through your parents or television, is simply not the same as actually experiencing how dramatically different it felt just to be in the world pre smartphone.

They chose to write an article using such insulting wording.

But you’re right, we shouldn’t respond to it or take the bait

I think you’re also ignoring the part I quoted. “Can we ever understand” ?? Gosh I don’t know we’re all so stupid and unable to study any kind of history !

I don’t see why that would be insulting at all. If you didn’t grow up in that world, you can’t understand it really - having it explained to you, studying it, or emulating the situation today can’t replace an era from the past. I’m not offended I can’t understand what it was like to ‘go steady’ with a girl like they did in the 50’s and that doesn’t make me stupid.

I wrote an opinion. I understand people don’t always share my opinion. Debating this further is boring and going nowhere

> I also have trouble understanding this response people have to feel like any discussion of generational trends is somehow an insult to themselves and their generation. [...] why does everyone get so defensive about those as though they're being blamed for something?

It gets attributed to a lot of things (Narcissism, autism, etc.) but one thing I've personally noticed is how passive-aggressive younger generations have become with their bullying of each other. We overpoliced physical bullying to the point where you can't shove someone around without getting caught on camera from six different angles, so it's become an artform to cut others down with underhanded insults that aren't actionable when reported to [school or parental] authorities. "Crybullying" is now a thing, where you say something provocative to someone else, then run to the principal insisting you're the one being bullied when they come after you. All passive forms of aggression, and mostly undetectable.

How else do we have fewer kids getting beaten up at school, mandatory accept-everyone policies and everything-pride assemblies, yet so many more kids are now claiming mental health issues? After zero-tolerance-for-violence policies, we now have more school shootings? We're not even being lazy and blaming Grand Theft Auto and Marilyn Manson-- they're no longer a common denominator; the latter stopped being relevant decades ago. We're starting to attribute it to the internet by handwaving at social media (because we really nailed one-attribution-fits-all after Columbine) but I submit there's something else going on in schools that we're not doing a good enough job exploring. Take crybullying-- there's no internet, no social media, no technology involved at all. It wasn't a thing when I was in school; the worst I had to deal with was getting shoved into lockers. We never corrected the bullying situation, just forced its evolution.

So I am not at all surprised younger generations are hypersensitive to any form of criticism. There are a lot of Narcissists among them thanks to the Age of the Influencer, but the rest of the demographic seems to have lost the ability to tell the difference between objective observations and veiled criticism because, like Theon Greyjoy at the hands of Ramsay Bolton, they can't be certain what's a carrot, what's a stick, who's being passive-aggressive, and who's being earnest. Internet shenanigans haven't helped, but it's not the cause.

I like the comfy nostalgia in this piece. Simpler, arguably better, times.

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