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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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