On the Job, Then and Now

Every once in a while, I think about the differences that have occurred in the workplace over the last few decades, starting in the early 1980's when I graduated from business school and started my professional career.

The most noticeable difference is clearly the technology.

When I started work - in a technology company, by the way - we did our largely computer-based work (running forecasting models, doing analysis, creating reports....) on mainframe computers, which we accessed via 300 baud paper based terminals called DEC-Writers. We worked in a communal computer room - The Terminal Room -  and, as there weren't enough computers to go around, if someone left their spot for more than 15 minutes, it was OK to put someone's session into "sleep mode" and start using their terminals.

We had a couple of Anderson-Jacobson terminals that we could use for printing reports and graphics. If Ben, the cleaning guy, came near one of them with the vacuum cleaner, it would through your graphics off - a pie chart would come out shaped like a lemon. And we had a couple of CRT screens that were faster and easier to use than the DEC-Writers, so there was a lot of competition for them.

Over a short period of time, the DEC-Writers were replaced by screen terminals (VT something-or-others; VT 131s?) which we all had in our offices. The end of The Terminal Room signaled a real shift in our culture. All of a sudden, we were on our own. In The Terminal Room, if you had a question about XSIM, the arcane forecasting and programming language we used, you could just yell out, "How do I set a global variable?" or "What's the function for calculating a Poisson Distribution?", someone could help you out.

But before long, we weren't worrying about how to do things in XSIM: the personal computer had arrived.

Obviously, the computing technology changes had a profound impact on the workplace - and having worked in mainframe timesharing, mini-computer, PC, and Web-based software companies (among other things) - I've lived through a lot of it.

And the idea of working from home...

But there are other things - some directly tech related, some not - that also changed over the years.

There was a time when there was no voice mail, so an admin or the receptionist would take a message on a pink phone slip to let you know who called. This was in a day and age when there were still admins who did things like Xerox and make your travel reservations.

Now, at least in tech companies, at most levels of the organization, you're on your own, baby.

I've always worked in places that had some however primitive form of e-mail but - get this - it used to be just for internal people. You couldn't send a message to someone on the outside world.

Before there was PowerPoint, you created 35 MM slide presentations, so costly and time consuming to make that you only did your official product presentation every 6 months or so. (So you tell me whether having PowerPoint is a productivity enhancer, or de-enhancer.) For internal or less formal presentations, you printed your points on glassine sheets, oddly called "foils", where the formatting was more or less limited to a couple of different fonts (Helvetica and Courier) and, if you were lucky, you got to play with BOLD, italic, and underline. And maybe bullets.

I never worked with really heavy smokers, and have no recall of being bothered by smoking at meetings, but at one place I worked, you could smoke if you had a closed door office, or if you were willing to go into a "smoking room." (Non-smokers would not want to be within 50 yards of a "smoking room.")

Another placed I worked had an unofficial smoking policy that pertained to grass. If you wanted to smoke a joint at our weekly Friday Party, you had to go to the Production Room.  A couple of people did smoke grass on the job. They went out to their cars at lunch and came back glassy-eyed. Those were the days....)

We didn't do this a lot, but "in the old days", when you went out for lunch for any occasion - someone's birthday, a going away party, first nice day - it was common to order pitchers of beer or glasses of wine. Maybe this is still done by the "young folk", but the thought of having a couple of glasses of beer and heading back to work just makes me sleepy.

Dress code is another big change I've seen over the year.

My first post-business school job didn't require that I wear a suit every day, and most of the guys didn't wear ties, but the women for the most part wore dresses or skirts. Maybe a nice pair of woolen pants if it was 15 degrees out.

When I worked at Wang, I did wear a formal business suit most of the time. These were menswear suits, which I referred to as "penis envy suits", worn with a silk (often bowed) shirt, or one of those insidious floppy bowties. 

Certainly, in the technology world, the dress code is more or less anything goes, but even when I worked in places where the code was about as strict as one of those beach restaurants with the sign "no shirts, no shoes, no service", I've always been more of a business casual-plus work dresser. Now, even when I'm at a client site where everyone pretty much wears jeans, I'll always have on a nice pair of pants and a sweater or jacket. (Which is not to say that I never wore jeans to work.)

Ah, the good old days....

Sometimes it's hard to remember that it wasn't all that long ago that work meant a skirt, heels, and pantyhose. That checking for messages meant going to the front desk to see if you had any of those little pink phone slips. That being on a business trip meant that you were more or less cut off from what was happening back home, or at home office.

Not to mention that, when you got home and kicked those heels off, your time was your own: no cellphones, pagers, IMs, emails, let-me-just-check-to-see-if-I-heard-from-X-I-promise-I'll-just-be-another-minute...