When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak? | Hacker News Reader

When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?

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For me, the first noticeable encroachment of bleakness was when we stopped having offices and started having to work in cubes.

My first few white collar jobs were miserable experiences - stress, temperamental bosses, lack of agency, etc. It got better but that took years of effort, at which point I was already thinking about leanFIRE, compelled by AI (this back in 2018) and climate concerns.

My dad had a private office, and his secretary had one too. Both offices looked out over a lake, and were large rooms. My dad had an informal sofa area by the window, and the secretary's office was slightly less grand but still had plenty of space. He earned about the same as me inflation adjusted. His secretary obviously far less, though they both got a gold-plated final salary pension on top.

What are the chances of that happening today for anyone not in the C-suite?

I never had a private office until I started working from home. My pension comes out of my salary and all the risk of markets falling etc falls on my shoulders.

For one thing, the rich were as rich in proportion as today. That alone would need to be reversed.

Right, as a percentage of the total employed population, the benefits of your dad's job were much more rare than yours are today. Remember how many more people were working in manufacturing and agriculture at that point. This is a flattening. I'm also betting you make significantly more dollars, inflation adjusted, then he did.

The factory workers at the same company had respectable jobs and also gold-plated salaries. They were unionized but the only time I remember the union taking collective action was when the company was threated by a take-over by (what we'd now call) a private equity asset stripper. Together with management they successfully fought off the bid.

And in case you're thinking this all sounds very inefficient, the same company still exists today.

I think that sounds great. Very rare, but great. What do they make? Or what did they make back in those times?

Looking at the early scenes in the matrix, I think it must be nice to have a little cubicle, rather than the hot desk situation we have now

Oh, man, my sympathies.

I had a great job at a company that later switched to an open office layout. I found it so intolerable that I quit a couple of months afterwards. There's exactly zero chance that I'd accept a position where hot-desking was a thing. I can't imagine any job being worth that.

Obviously. The cubicle was invented as a more humane and private alternative to the standard open plan office of the 1960s, let alone hotdesking which is somehow even more of a fungible human cog than the open plan office.

You mean the 80s?

Mid 90s for me. But when that shift happened isn't very relevant. I was just pointing out when I noticed that working in an office had started to become bleak. Things have continually become more bleak ever since.

My mind immediately went to that one shot near the beginning of Tron where the cubicles stretch off into the distance of the building.

That was 1982

I also miss smoking my pipe in the office, surrounded by rich mahogany.

You guys had cubes? Lucky you, they did put us all in an open plan room like cattle.

In the 80s, after you graduated from college and got a white-collar job, you probably didn't have much in student loans, and if you did, you could be assured you'd pay them off in a couple of years. Then you'd have money saved up to put down on a house. If you wanted you could get married and have kids. Take two weeks vacation every summer to the shore or the mountains. You expected to be able to afford to put your kids through college, and after 35 years or so of service, you could retire with a pension and a gold Rolex as thanks for your service.

Where there ever pensions in the tech business? Maybe ibm in the 50’s or 60’s…. Did DEC have pensions? Large, old employers like governments or pharma or union-supporting companies had pensions, but the rest had “defined contribution” retirement instead.

Computers blew away the pink-collar job fields which took away much of the non-tech employment. Hard to assemble a 2 tech family with children due to the lack of remote work and the lack of affordable housing where the job-islands are. And a house then was way, way smaller and less featureful than what people want today an and toys were also way cheaper and simpler.

what the market delivers and what people want aren't always the same. imo demand is there for smaller dwellings, it's just not profitable enough to get delivered either because of the margin on large spaces / needing to overcome high labor & overhead. i would love to live in an ADU were it to be cheaper than a 1 bed or well sited / modern.

I started a job in summer 1998 and I had a pension until they were acquired in about 2011 or so. It was so invisible that I forgot all about it until I switched to another job and they contacted me to decide what to do about the pension now that I'd left.

There aren't many, but they are out there.

I did not distinguish pensions per se from other programs run and, most importantly, guaranteed by the employer. In all cases the employee could be assured of a minimum retirement income based on years of service and salaries. This is in contrast to 401k and similar investment schemes where, at best, the employer will partially match employee contributions but at the end of 35 years the actual value of the funds is subject to the vagaries of the stock and bond markets and may not be sufficient to live and could even be zero. The point being: risk and responsibility for retirement is entirely on the individual.

> Where there ever pensions in the tech business?

Superannuation schemes in Australia, Singapore, etc.

Mind you these kinds of schemes provide pensions for all workers across all industries and aren't limited to the tech business.

It's my understanding that pensions were quite rare, certainly much more so than 401ks, so at least that expectation might be a bit more rosy than reality.

I don’t know if bleak is the right word, but keeping up with the pace of change with LLMs is exhausting.

Same, which is why I just go with my own pace and stop being FOMO. Fortunately my org is not that gung-ho about pushing AI.

After the way white collar workers have treated blue collar workers affected by outsourcing and globalization, expect zero sympathy for yuppies replaced by AI.

Definitely pre-Dilbert and Office Space.

It's cyclical. Socioeconomic status is relative, so when we experience absolute economic growth, we expect socioeconomic growth too, but that can't happen without kicking others out. This is called elite overproduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction.

Twenty five years ago, if you had a 40" TV, a 200 horsepower car, and a convection oven (now usually called an air fryer) you were well off, but those are all baseline now. Fifty years ago, if you had a 1,200 square foot home with two bathrooms, and a two-car garage, you were doing very well, but the median newly-built housing unit is now over 2,000 square feet. One hundred years ago, if you had a refrigerator or even a radio, you were super rich, and even having electricity in your household made you better off than almost half of the country.

You can work as a grunt and get what your parents only dreampt of as children, and be socioeconomically well below average. An organization cannot operate with most of its members in top-level positions. If successful, it can pretend to, but most of the upper-level positions will be meaningless, and its liable to be outdone by a competing organization that isn't top heavy. After periods of sustained economic growth, we play along as though there's similar socioeconomic growth, but that's definitionally impossible, and the upper socioeconomic rungs will redefine themselves.

The only option is to not base your happiness on high socioeconomic status. Half the population isn't even average, let noticeably above that, so even though it's a worthwhile goal, if doing otherwise makes you unhappy, chances are you will be unhappy, with no innovation or policy able to make it probable that you will do otherwise.

Here's an excellent book on the topic: https://musaalgharbi.com/we-have-never-been-woke-available-n...

Thank you - I completely agree. We have so much more than our parents did.

Alain de Botton's book "Status Anxiety" is excellent about this topic, too.

I agree partly.

But I think another reason why society looks so bleak today is because specific areas have regressed since their peak around 2000-2026. Even if median QOL is highest (which I doubt), Consider these common complaints:

- The best housing / median income (even accounting for size) was awhile ago

- Many types of food like meat have increased more than median income for some time

- Specific brands have lowered quality, e.g. Pyrex, Komoot

- The social scene in most places was much better. And online, we have more people and media than ever, but also more spam, propaganda, and gatekeeping

- More private offices and cubicles in the past, more WFH right after 2020

- More perks and higher salary compared to median for tech workers until around 2022

- Cheaper RAM and memory sometime around 2022-2025

- The best LLM (Mythos/Fable) was available a few days ago

Humans are biased to weigh disadvantages disproportionately more than advantages: even if someone was less happy in the past, when they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of that time vs today, they believe they were happier. So even if today wasn’t especially bleak, people may always wish for the past.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep addressing today’s pressing issues, even though the fixes will inevitably create more issues. Because without change, things would slowly objectively get worse.

You've picked a handful of consumer goods which have become cheaper due to technology and used them to construct a narrative entirely opposite of reality.

It would be more accurate to say the baby boomers could "work as a grunt and get what their children only dreampt of"

Single-income households, lifelong employment at the same company, people buying houses at 23 and having kids at 25, pensions, affordable health insurance, inexpensive college, people working their way up from the mail room to the C-suite. All taken for granted as typical, middle-America norms a few decades ago, but utterly unrecognizable to Millenials and Gen-Z.

Yes, people today have big TVs and air fryers. And they can use them to self-medicate briefly against the anxiety of rent that takes 40% of their post-tax income, student loans they'll be paying for the next decade and the knowledge that the whims of executives they've never met could make them lose their job tomorrow and be faced with a loss of healthcare and housing in short order.

Most people would happily downgrade their TV and drive a lower horsepower car in exchange for stable employment, no debts, no retirement worries and a spouse who doesn't have to work a corporate job.

> The only option is to not base your happiness on high socioeconomic status.

In a way, that's the core tenet of the left: We cannot all be billionaires, so the state should acknowledge that and provide a robust safety net, so that even for the average or below-average part of the population, life stays bearable.

In contrast, the right's ideology seems to be more "winner takes it all", and if we can bring forth a single Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Donald Trump, then the rest doesn't matter.

Which is really only palatable if everyone believes they will belong to the winning elite some day.

Bob Cratchit had a hard time as a clerk.

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