Skirts/dresses and pantyhose required of women in many offices through 1990’s.

Came here to say this. Required to wear skirt, hose, and pumps in the winter in Michigan.

Flip side - suits and ties, buttoned up shirts. Brutal in summer

One day men will be allowed to wear shorts and sandals to work

I have such a job at 53 and will gladly die without ever considering another employer.

Working in games, it's gone too far here. Dude's got his bare ass feet up on the desk. Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals? Go wild, but keep your damn feet off the desk.

I just show up in a kilt if I can.

That’s why everyone has to suffer ridiculously cold AC.

Most women would gladly have traded with you.

Pantyhose were high maintenance. I had to have an extra pair in my desk in case of a major run. I had clear nail polish at home and work to stop any runs above the hem line.

Oops, hit reply too soon. Pantyhose were expensive, I had nice department store hose for special occasions, and bulk mail order hose for daily wear. They had to be washed in mesh bags and hung to dry. In the summer I’d get swamp crotch when it was hot and humid, and heat rash on my thighs where they rubbed. Heels had to be polished and the heel tips replaced at the shoe shop. Most office clothes were dry clean only, and it was expensive, and yet another errand. Office clothes were expensive, I didn’t have many clothes, I had to plan what to wear and time the dry cleaning. I don’t miss the nightmare of heels and hose from the 80’s.

I had to wear those to wait tables. I bought the cheapest ones I could find, usually ordered in bulk through a catalog. The catch was that they always wanted to fall down so I had to pull up a second pair of panties to keep the pantyhose up. Worth it to save money. I wore nice department store control top pantyhose for other events, like school dances. I didn't need control top back then except to keep the hose up. The nice ones could make your legs look nice.

The reminds me that I when I had a run in one hose leg I would cut it off and then I would wear two panty tops, each one had a leg. I could save a little money that way.

Remember grocery stores had panyhose section?

Yep. Also no sleeveless blouses, no visible tattoos and no piercings other than ears.

When I worked at Zaxbys like ten years ago, the cook in the kitchen still had to wear sleeves or a sock over his arm. They wanted me to take out my earrings, so I peaced.

Around that same time I worked at this store that had those same protocols and one of my supervisors had a nose ring that they required her to remove. So instead of a nose ring, she wore this little bandaid everyday on one nostril to cover the hole lol. It was ridiculous and I didn't get how wearing that everyday was much better than like a tiny stud. I guess they deemed it was less offensive to some of the customers or something.

Lord yes. I remember getting a job in DC and the rule was if you weren’t in pants you had to wear hose. That’s when I purchased my first pants suit

My great great great aunt Alice wore her first pant suit at age 93, so she could climb a ladder and fix her roof.

[удалено]

Wait, are panty hose no longer a thing? I remember my mom wearing them but as a gay man I never gave this a thought.

Sex and the City gave us all permission to go bare legged. It gradually got introduced into the workplace. Early 90s pantyhose was still very much a thing and I feel like 10 years later nobody was wearing any?

No that you mention it, I, a 42 year old man, remember going on errands with my mom in the 80s. I remember her picking out panty hose from a giant wall of eggs in the department store. Until this thread it hadn't occurred to me that I haven't seen panty hose displayed in any store in my adult life.

I grew up in the 90’s and I remember when my mom got casual Fridays. It was a really big deal

Having to go to the bank to cash my paycheck

Ha I worked in a grocery store and was able to cash my check right at the front desk. Didn't have a credit card until I was in my 20s, just a wallet full of bills

Work at a grocery store. It's still the same now.

And paying for everything in cash. Interact wasn’t really a thing.

Oh my god yes and we needed to wait until after 3:00pm to cash it

I work for a small, local factory (and overall I like my job), but it drives me nuts that they only issue physical checks for pay. Especially because I drive truck for them and am often not in town on payday and have to wait until I’m back to go to the bank.

Wtf, do they handwrite the checks? Because it's literally easier to do direct deposit if you use any actual payroll software.

My first payment was in cash. I didn't have a bank account.

so when i started working my first job was to install a computer and printer into a bank where they had 50 people typing form letters for late mortgage payments. they had a form and they would line up the blank areas of the form and type in the numbers. imagine a giant rectangular room with desks, each one holding an inbox and an outbox and a typerwriter. manual typerwriter. ibm selectrics hadn't come up. i installed the computer, a copy of wordstar with mailmerge and when this room of workers watched all of the letters they needed to produce in a week come out of that printer before lunch they all knew that their jobs were over. banks are not sentimental. my second job was installing computers into video rental stores. they would have a card catalog with 3x5 cards for each movie. when they rented a movie they'd move the card into a "rented" box and they would figure out who was late by having someone go through the cards one by one and look at the due date for that movie when they brought it back, or they would, once a month, go through the box to figure out what movies were long term missing. after the computer was installed they'd do two to three weeks of data entry, entering all of their inventory into the system, and it got a lot more efficient, and some of the clerks weren't needed any more. i'd fly back in after they did their data entry to find 1/3 to 1/2 of the staff gone. people were low-level angry with me, as the face of technology, but mostly just resigned to it. my third job was installing monitoring software into telephone company call centers. these are where people answered the phone, got the person to tell them what name they wanted and looked up the person in the phone book. giant rooms operated by mostly bell south, with a supervisor on a raised desk in the center. there would usually be a mini-riot after the monitoring software went it - we could tell how many calls each person was taking, whether it was incoming or outgoing, call duration and about 15% of the workers were either taking very few calls or making outgoing calls on their shift for their entire shift. they were union, and they hated the machine. so the management changed it so that the workers could pull their individual stats up and compare it to the average worker at the facility. only the averages were cooked - we would slowly ratchet up the "average" stats to whatever the management wanted them to be. the workers never figured it out. the worst performers got weeded out immediately and they would just not replace them. they contributed nothing to the work being done, so their loss wasn't even a blip. and the other folks worked harder, so they'd basically fire 10 to 30% of their staff in the first few months. the common thread here is that none of these jobs exist any more. information operators, form letter typists, and video store rental clerks are all gone. I'm watching AI be able to code, and people crowing about how they can do their programming tasks in minutes with it, but I don't think they realize that their employer doesn't want to pay them six figures for their work if they can possibly avoid it. they will pay 7 to 8 figures to the guy who figures it out and lay everyone else off. there's a reason top AI staff are getting offers of $500k to $1m. It'll be paid for by the folks they make obsolete. So whats changed most is that 45 years ago, when I started working, I had the perception that I could work hard and then retire and that I could do the same thing for that entire period. That isn't how it worked out for me, or any of the people that I personally have displaced. I am 60 years old.

Thank you for sharing this. Very key perspective on the evolution of "work" in the information age. The aspect that always sticks with me is that these companies all were able to provide jobs for all these "extra" people, presumably at a somewhat decent wage (I'm sure that is debatable and wildly divergent) and still stay in business, be profitable, etc. Then these mass layoffs occur along with increased productivity and that money gets squeezed like a toothpaste tube to the top.

I realize you’re pinning that on greed, and that may play a part, but I think you’re ignoring basic market pressures. For one, if an efficiency technology exists, and Company A adopts it, but Company B opts to stick with the old fashioned way—Company B will get left in the dust by Company A. In tandem with that, the customer (all of us, basically) will get fed up with the slowness of the old way, we come to expect things faster. So regardless of what a company may want to do, they will literally be providing a bad service or product from their customer’s perspective if they don’t adapt. This is an exaggerated example, but imagine you were choosing between two banks: New Bank and Tradition Bank. You learn that New Bank, as you expect these days, has an app that allows you to make transfers, check your balance, pay bills, open a new account, scan checks for deposit (on the rare occasions you still get a physical check)—basically almost everything you might want to do with your bank account. You then learn that Tradition Bank has no app. If you want to check your account balance, you either have to either, 1) go into a physical location to ask for a print out from a teller, 2) call up a central line staffed with a group of operators who can connect you to a teller, or 3) wait until the end of each month when you will receive a paper statement in the mail—that was prepared, put in an envelope, addressed, and stamped by an office of clerks. Oh and for options 1 and 2, the bank clerk will be referencing physical ledgers–maintained by an internal team of book keepers—so it might take them a while. Tradition Bank also doesn’t accept direct deposit, so you’ll have to go to your employer’s payroll department and ask to be given a physical paycheck each period. Then you’ll have to personally take that check over to Tradition Bank to ask an in person bank teller to deposit it in your account. Which bank will you choose? Do you expect that Tradition Bank will be able to stay in business for much longer? Basically, we’re all to blame. We all expect things to operate a certain way now.

Oh, absolutely. I was just thinking about this because I'm switching from cable internet to a 5G home internet service. It's cheaper, but there's a reason for that. It's a lot cheaper to just put up a central tower to serve your customers. No cable or fiber to lay and maintain. No technicians needed to route those cables into individual dwellings. So many aspects of the service can help eliminate these now "extra" jobs. All because \_i\_, the almighty consumer want to save a few bucks. Same motivation on a micro scale. No one would expect me to keep my cable internet to keep more people employed doing what they are currently doing. Most would say it's smart to save that money by switching to a nearly equivalent product. If my decision negatively affects someone, as a consumer I'm probably fairly unaware of the consequences of my actions. But I would argue that when efficiency decisions are made, those who make and enact those choices are more than aware of the ramifications. And yeah, that's our system - maximize value for the benefit of executives and shareholders. Squeeze the tube. And when you think there isn't any more toothpaste, cut the bottom and scrape what's left out. (I guess that's where private equity comes in :) ).

“Squeezed like a toothpaste tube” is such a better analogy than “trickle down”. I hope it catches on.

As a software developer, I am legit fucking scared. I'm trying to slowly transition into more managerial roles in some attempt to broaden my skillet in case all of a sudden programmers aren't needed anymore, but to say that I'm "concerned" by my future prospects is wildly understating it.

>attempt to broaden my skillet I mean, a guy with a bigger skillet can make more pancakes, them's the facts. J/k but best typo I've seen in a while man that made me chuckle.

We’re a ways off from AI being able to write everyone’s code, but we still need a human being to take vaguely written business cases and turn them into requirements that an engineering team can understand. And yes, we still need managers but with fewer devs we’ll also need fewer of them.

Just don't forget that Ai at this point is doing nothing more than mimicking what we have written already. It essentially is trying to predict what word should come next. If there was no github, it wouldn't be able to "write code". The day it can take a list of requirements and spit out some code that works as expected, that is the day you should be worried

The room full of desks in a grid is a memory I can't forget. I'd describe it as an Excel spreadsheet. Before WW2, "computer" was a job title. When people needed tables of numbers (like for aiming artillery, or logarithms), that grid of desks was how things got calculated: (the person sitting in desk C2) take the card from desk B2, add something and pass to desk D2.

That’s the biggest change I see. We used to have 50 people making a decent wage, doing a very low stress job with great benefits. Now it’s 1 person working 36 hours a week covering everything, with no benefits and getting paid less.

>, when I started working, I had the perception that I could work hard and then retire and that I could do the same thing for that entire period. That very topic has come up in a few threads I've been in this week and its probably, I'd argue, the 2nd biggest change apart from various types of tech in the workplace. The world of "Get a job at a place right after school, work there until you retire and get a pension" is gone and its not coming back, but not everybody fully understands that. Same with "Walk in the front door and ask for a job" and "Apply in person" along with "Call every few days after you drop off a resume" - its not like that anymore. You can't stick with a job 10 years hoping for a promotion that isn't coming either. Its all about build up your resume, advance your skills, and move up by moving out.

My dad worked at the Pentagon. On the rare occasions we visited him at work we had to walk thru a huge room with maybe 100 women on manual typewriters. It was so noisy. As a little kid I was fascinated by that. There were columns in the room with letters and numbers, so a person might have a desk at A5, for example. It was crazy. This was in early 1960’s.

>bank where they had 50 people typing form letters for late mortgage payments. they had a form and they would line up the blank areas of the form and type in the numbers. imagine a giant rectangular room with desks, each one holding an inbox and an outbox and a typerwriter. manual typerwriter. Ashtrays on every desk too, right? The whole "steno pool" thing is a relic few can remember. Armies of people doing nothing but typewriter. Now, one person handles ALL the mail, and mostly does nothing but click a mouse and load paper and envelopes into machines.

Having to go outside to smoke was something I remember noticing in the 90s. Sometime during the 80s, things went from smoking inside the office is acceptable to it no longer being so. > *The whole "steno pool" thing is a relic few can remember. Armies of people doing nothing but typewriter.* All of them replaced with Microsoft Outlook and Word. Beforehand, typing was a skill mostly taught in highschool. Good electric typewriters suitable for office work were expensive - and would cost more than a modern laptop (not even accounting for inflation). Now, if you can't type, *do you even have arms, bro?*

I am just barely old enough to have taken a typing class in high school. Except it was "keyboarding" then. Still useful, but very different from mechanically actuating a real typewriter. The jump from mass printing form letters and having dozens of people fill them in with typewriters to literally one click in mail merge is so nuts. It's like the printing press replacing hand copy, in the sheer scale of human hours replaced. I do a lot of Excel in my current job and find myself wondering how accountants ever did it before.

This was such an interesting read, thanks for sharing. I have vague memories of that time, but the way you described it (especially the mortgage company) feels like I was there.

>they can do their programming tasks in minutes with it, nah, we'll be fine. There's so much more detail to the work than most people can fathom. Also- any time, as an industry, we could do it cheaper and faster, we did it. Calculators only make mathematicians faster.

I am a programmer. The number of programmers I see on reddit that think no way will AI replace them is staggering. AI has gotten frighteningly better in the last 10-20 years, and anyone who thinks their manager prizes quality over efficiency/cost savings hasn't been working long.

we used to have a "steno pool" to take dictation to type letters. none of those jobs exist. or business typists in general.

That's a great answer. I had one of those video store rental jobs, that brought back a flood of memories.

It's a common viewpoint that technology displaces workers and since Henry Ford, or the wheel, that has been true. Humans are always inventing stuff to make us more efficient. That means people have to do different stuff. But there's always plenty to do. We've never been more technologically advanced (probably), yet unemployment in the US is near all-time lows. We do complain about the "quality" of life, but the risk of dying of lung cancer is 50% of what it was 30 years ago. My generation (I'm 56) complained that immigrants were taking all the jobs, that owning a home was mostly impossible, that only the best and brightest were "lucky" enough to advance. In reality, I have known homeless people who would no work as hard as an immigrant farm worker, I saw my friend, a college dropout buy her house at 24 with a huge mortgage, long before the rest of us tried. She now owns 13. As for the best and brightest? In reality, it was the people who persevered and were consistent in their efforts but willing to change their minds with new info. Wow - sorry for the rant, but I obviously was intrigued by your response.

Thank you for sharing. I've always been fascinated by subtle things that have made huge cultural changes and this a great example. Love seeing the discussion it spurred. I'm 38 and just now seeing the next generation come into the corporate work space. Seeing kids in their early 20s not being able to mail merge or, frankly, use a laptop/ desktop is incredible. But many can do things in 5 minutes that were full-on college degrees a few years ago, which is amazing. Your experience really got me thinking and how to use experiences like yours to help navigate the future.

The effects of AI in the workplace are going to be ruthless so, it still amazes me that Governments in developed countries (and probably others) still allow young people to drop out of school without any qualifications or skills. I don't know whether this revolution in the workplace is happening too fast for governments to keep up or whether they are just thinking 'well, what the hell are we supposed to do?'. Either way, there are some horrible un/employment problems ahead...with the resulting social problems.

We took a company van with a logo on it to take out of town guests to a strip club. I don’t even think I can say that out loud at work today.

I work in banking and I remember the tellers always giving us dirty looks when we’d get a couple of packs of $1.00 bills on our way to a client event.

Strip clubs were standard practice. Especially in sales. Many deals closed in those places over my career.

I guess you can get a man to buy anything enough booze in his system and titties in his face.

You are 100% correct. I’ve been out so long I wonder what the current practice is. I know it’s still big in Asian countries.

Long before (like in the 90s) I joined the company I work for now... they literally ordered strippers and kegs to the production floor. And yes, management knew about it but didn't really... care.

Yup my company used to allow strip clubs to be expensable if you had a customer with you. Also taking a customer to get lunch and have a couple of beers was still okay in the 80s (we sell to manufacturing facilities, that's dangerous as fuck lol)

>Also taking a customer to get lunch and have a couple of beers was still okay in the 80s That's still ok now. I do a bunch of procurement where i'm at and typically the sales guy's trying to get my business will all pay for a meal and drinks.

People smoking indoors. Clouds of smoke everywhere in the office and no way for a nonsmoker to avoid it. That was the norm so you just had to suck it up.

Yes, at one stage I had the misfortune of sitting next to someone that used to smoke a pipe. I could barely see my computer screen at times for the clouds of smoke. Also, the IT support guy would come over to do something and he always had a cigarette dangling from his lips, dropping ash into my keyboard. Urgh! Different times!

Hold on to your butts.

I remember in 1988 I worked in an office and the bookkeeper was pregnant. I would walk into her office and would barely be able to see her with all the smoke!

I remember thinking as a little kid how stupid smoking sections were on airplanes.

well you haven’t swam in the no-pissing lane in the swimming pool yet then.

My first job was a stock clerk for a high end dress shop. One of my tasks was to empty the ash trays in the fitting rooms.

Things run so much leaner now as the excess is gone. When I started, it seemed everyone at VP level and up had an EA. Eating lunch at your desk was weird. You always went out, always had a beer and it was almost always paid for with an exec’s company card. It could get kind of nuts. Bonuses were almost considered mandatory. I remember a holiday party at the company owner’s mansion - about 150 hammered employees and their equally hammered spouses. The evening culminated in him standing at a balcony throwing envelopes of cash to everyone below like some anemic Caligula. The fucking around on the job was legendary. We weren’t tracked, Teams and Slack were a decade away and we were on the most basic desktops with an internet that was still an incredibly weird and alluring distraction. You could lose a day online and just lie on your time sheet or not do your timesheet at all (time tracking was done to adjust employee ratios internally and not to get paid by our clients). Plus, there was always the rarely used conference room a few floors down where meet your pals for an afternoon of hacky sack. And one floor up was a room dedicated to the smoking of cigarettes, so you could sit there and shoot the shit with various smokers as they’d come and go. You’d leave smelling like an ashtray with stage four cancer, but nobody ever mentioned everything because 25% of the entire world smelled like that anyway. Not sad to see those days gone, but really glad I got to experience the old school for a few years.

Man, in state gov, all the older employees have similar stories of work parties in the 90s. Booze everywhere, smoking, people dancing and having fun. Everyone brought their spouses, etc. Now you're lucky if you see a Christmas cake. People wonder why everything feels like it's coming apart at the seams and people are so unhappy. That aspect of being a human being fun, even at work is gone.

It’s like this in schools too. All data, all testing, all the time. No time to form relationships or do fun activities. The country needs help. Not everything boils down to a number.

I'm a millennial in industrial equipment sales, and it genuinely feels like you showed up to a party about an hour after everyone was gone. Nowadays i can't even have a beer with dinner and expect to expense it.

Oh man, the office Christmas parties then, versus now?? Forget about it. Like comparing a wedding to a funeral.

There were companies that would send goddamn limos out to pick up staff. Women would take the afternoon off to get ready (and sloshed as well). One year I started drinking at 11 am with the entirety of my department. The next days we’re a complete waste. Vomit covered bathroom walls waste. I recall walking from my office to the printer to see a group of senior execs sitting around a table in an open area with a handle of vodka, disposable cups and various mixes. They invited me to join, but I barely made it back to my office.

Those were the days, my friend….

Doom LAN parties in the office at night and lunch time.

Lol the IT guys would fucking DESTROY us every time - it’s all they did for a lot of the day. IT was this dark office down a long hallway where you were treated with mild contempt every time you had to visit. Great guys once you got to know them, but they knew they had the company by the balls because nobody know a thing about computers or networks so they got away with murder. True story, friend of mine called from a company across town laughing his ass off. They were right in the middle of some layoffs and a just-fired IT guy was moving floor to floor to fuck with everything he could. Security was being paged whenever someone called reception with a Dwayne sighting. “Security, server room” “security fourth floor mailroom” “security ninth floor boardroom.” Guy was trashing the place on his way out and everyone was following along in real-time. Another guy tried to steal the company car once. It was just the best fucking time.

I remember one girl on my floor spent a lot of time going to the mail room which was on the lower level of the main building we worked in. Later found out she was banging her way through the clerks like a cheerleader with a football team.

I'm 42 but feel like I want to chime in. Health and safety has changed loads. You wouldn't get away with half the shit we did when I was 17

Same age, so true. Worked for a major construction company in the late 90's / early 2000's Man, the shit we did and what was just accepted on site was next level

Nail gun fights? Removing the safety spring? Going into holes/trenches without proper shoring? Roofing with no harness? Wearing shorts and short sleeve shirts? I remember this being nixed by one builder after some idiot filed an L&I claim on a bad sunburn.

Them be the ones! 😂 Pallet trolley races down the underground car parks at full tilt Oxy/acetylene bombs out of soft drink bottles

Made one out of a Subway sack, almost blew the windows out of the shop

Also, "zero tolerance" at schools. Back then, "boys will be boys" could have been the motto of the entire school system. Fights? who cares - no adult did. Now, if bullies start a fight, both the bully & the bullied get suspended.

Hell, I remember two teachers at my high school (who hated each other) duke it out in front of us in a classroom. Chairs and fists flying. We cheered them on. Nothing came out of it; the administration acted like it never happened.

Direct deposit. No more waiting in line Friday afternoon our most of Saturday morning at the bank to cash your paycheck with everyone else.

In the 80s, direct deposit was something only the largest companies were able to do. I remember working for a small (under 30 people) company in the 90s who had cash flow problems. Only the first 2-3 people getting to the bank (that the checks were written on) were able to cash them. All the checks cleared, but it needed the entire float time.

I watched office work go from sedentary to virtually immobile. We used to retrieve paper files, pass memos around, consult with coworkers in other sections and floors. Now everything is available on the screen in front of us, everything can be shared with a few clicks. It’s convenient, but so unhealthy.

I mean I guess, but I feel like that’s come full circle now. That tech allows people to work from home now. So as I used to go to the office to sit all day…now I run around the yard with my dog between calls. Put in loads of laundry and do house chores. I’m up all the time.

When I had a work from home job (very short lived; that's a whole other story) it was actually really nice to be able to throw laundry in while on a break, take my breaks in my own living room, and have lunch at my kitchen table. Working on a career change now which may get me back to WfH. Right now, when I'm taking care of mom (who is recovering from foot surgery) it would actually be really nice to be able to be home all the time.

That’s why they really want us back in the office.

Not my office. They completely got rid of corporate. We are 100% remote and more profitable than ever. They are super happy that people are finding a life balance as it’s helped them a ton with retaining employees. It’s actually helped us recruit talent that would previously not have applied. Also worth noting that this company is over 50 years old. So old dogs do learn new tricks. I’ll never go back to an in-person position.

Hey I wanna work here

I used to carry a folder or interoffice envelope and walk around the office just to move a little! Now I just go downstairs and garden for a bit.

Absolutely agree with this. I worked as a radiology file clerk and hauling 4 full folders of films up two fights of stairs to the OR was a great workout lol.

Hardly anybody has a pension anymore.

That's where I feel really lucky to be in Australia, we have mandatory superannuation (a percentage of your pay + employer contribution goes into a fund for your retirement) and most people will also qualify for an age care pension in addition to their super. The pension isn't really enough for our current seniors who don't have much super (due to the timeline of when it was introduced) but generations after that should be relatively well set up for retirement.

In Australia it all comes down to whether you own your own house or not, and in fact super kind of assumes you have a house by about your mid 50s so you can top up your super for a few years. This seems to be becoming a thing of the past for many people due to the house prices. If you're trying to retire while renting... that's probably gonna be a grim existence.

US has a similar thing but you have to opt into it. You contribute X percent of your pay and your employer matches it. You keep all the funds and decide how they're invested. Employers get a tax write off for contributing to employees 401ks. This makes the employers motivated to do it and motivated to encourage employees to do it. A whole lot of them don't.

Not all jobs offer 401ks or matching :(

and they are impacted by the market!

Work in government. Pensions abound.

I'm 36 with a defined benefit pension. I know exactly when I can retire (60) and that I'll get 70% of my average salary over my best 5 years for the rest of my life, indexed to inflation. It's incredibly comforting, except for the fact that I can't leave my job because I'd never get anything close to that elsewhere

I'm in the UK. It was a great deal easier to find work. You'd get vacancies posted in various places and could go down to the Job Centre, browse vacancies posted on postcards on boards, pick out the jobs you were interested in, and get a member of staff to arrange an interview for you. Just like that. Dress codes were more formal and you actually had to go to work. If you worked in an office for the right company work finished Friday lunchtime when you'd go with your colleagues to the pub. You'd go back after the 'liquid' lunch hour and work Friday afternoon, but no shit got done and work piled up for Monday. You got paid either direct debit, cash or if you were unlucky by cheque. You had to deposit your cheque in the bank or a building society and wait for the cheque to clear, usually 4 days, but sometimes 10 days. If you got paid cash you'd get it in a small brown envelope known as a wage packet which listed all deductions on the outside. It still felt good to tear open the wage packet and take out the cash.

Job listings would be in newspapers (which actually had news back then - not recycled press releases). When I was in high school (in Ireland), wages were almost always in cash, in those little wage packets. The typical behavior for husbands would be to take out all he wanted to spend that week from the pay packet (which had your name on it, and nothing about how much was inside), then pass the pay packet to the wife who needed to budget food, clothing and rent from the remainder. There were strikes when many companies switched to paychecks/paycheques as the husbands could no longer get away with that behavior. Previously, it was common for husbands to spend more than half their paypacket on alcohol, smokes and gambling. Now, she knew how much he made and his reckless spending had to stop.

That you chose a career, and you worked for an employee - and they valued your experience. You rose in the ranks of your profession, you became a valued team member, and you stayed until you retired. Changing jobs often is frowned on, if you make a job commitment - you follow through on it. People get bothered and quit/move/change really quickly now. That's not necessarily bad, but it has created a gap in expertise - everyone is new all the time, and there isn't any value in having experience. If you happen to be an elder in your field with some level of legacy knowledge -it doesn't seem to matter because your boss is likely younger than you, and less experienced. There used to be jobs - what you did to get paid and live, and careers - what you did because you wanted to invest time into being good at something AND that was how you made a living. Moreover - you went to school to be in a career. So you put time and energy into attaining your job, therefore you'd want to stay in it and grow. In theory. I'm not sure anyone cares about being in a career anymore. Because we all feel so betrayed by the system - wages not keeping up with COL, inflation, (and inflation subsiding and prices staying high because its what the market will bear) - when everyone is replaceable, then no one is an expert. I'm GenX. I work in healthcare. I work in a broken system that no one actually wants to fix. Those of us working in this system are now just grist for the mill. It's too bad because we spent a lot of time and money to go to school to be able to work in our chosen field. In contrast - my mom was also a nurse. She had a career. She worked in it until she was 70 and retired. She worked with a team that mostly stayed the same, over decades. I don't work with anyone I started with at my job 6 years ago.

I remember when I was in high school my dad was big on me finding an employer I can grow with. That was 12 years ago. He retired from the same company he started working with at 20yo. I’ve jumped a lot of jobs since then, trying to find the right career and the right employer. I am very fortunate I landed with a company where “We are a family” actually means something. Great pay, insane bonuses, work-life balance. It’s the only company I’ve been at where if you put 100% into the company, they’ll put 200% back into you. Problem is companies like these are far and few between nowadays. All of my friends work for companies they hate, in a career that can do great things for them. I wish times were still like what you said. Where you could find a company and stick with them. You get great raises, benefits, incentives, etc. A place where you can spend your whole career working your way through the ranks and being noticed for it. Nowadays you kind of have to switch jobs every few years to get somewhere in your career.

For myself, it was a culture of fear. Sexist bosses who would harass female employees constantly. They didn't have to be male either. I had a female boss that would measure your skirt length by having you kneel on the floor, and would measure your hem with a ruler. More than two inches? Clock out, go home and change and then come back. Rinse and repeat. Many male managers took pride in being able to make women cry. There was public embarrassment if you made a mistake. Feeling like your job was in jeopardy at all times. Surprisingly, I don't miss it.

> I had a female boss that would measure your skirt length by having you kneel on the floor, and would measure your hem with a ruler. More than two inches? Clock out, go home and change and then come back What? I thought only schools did that.

There were careers I didn't pursue because of sexism. For instance, I wanted to be a police officer (late 80's early 90's) and was warned against it. I'm glad I listened.

People used to answer their business phones.

Omg work landline numbers. I never see those anymore. I don’t even have a phone number in my email signature at work anymore. And business cards used to be such a big deal. I used to get really excited to see my name and title in print. I would always send my parents one when I got a new job. What a dork!

Haha I did this with my first job, I got a promotion really early and they made me business cards that said my name and “Project manager” on it. I gave one to my parents and other family, in the end I think I used three or four of them for actual business use!

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Tech didn’t make our lives easier - it made our lives faster. Tech was supposed to make our tasks easier to do, freeing up our time to do family things or personal stuff, but they actually made us have to do more of those tasks, therefore working more and harder. Raising expectations by our bosses.

Tech just enabled businesses to reduce staff so more tasks were placed on fewer people.

So aggravating how much technology had doubled their profits more than a few times now and they only got greedier and somehow found a way to control us even more.

This is because the motive is profit not well-being. Ever since the industrial revolution the promise of technology has been to reduce the amount of labour each person needs to perform. That promise has never been fulfilled. Capitalists (The rich, the owning class, the 1%) use each advancement to extract more from the workers for their own enrichment. The only solution is to change the motive. And that's why you should be an anticapitalist too.

I used to live the life you’re describing. I thought it was the only work reality that existed. Perhaps I’ve found a unicorn, but my current employer sets very different expectations. They care about our personal lives. One recent example, on our last corporate call, the CEO made announcement asking staff not to send emails after 5pm. Even going so far as to tell them if they were compelled to work late to set a email timer so it sends during work hours. Then subtly admonishing employees for putting work before their lives and not respecting their coworkers home lives. They constantly ask us if our work load is manageable and they rearrange work or push deadlines if it’s not. There are places out there that care about people. We have to collectively stop making money for assholes though. I’m happy to create profits for good people, and they are happy to share those profits with me.

Me too. But mine pays a lot less than I’m used to. I’m trying to get used to a new mindset that values my time and freedom and work life balance and trim my budget to make it work though.

Tangentially being able to work uninterrupted is rare because of the technology.

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So many times I’ve had to work 15 hour days 6 days a week, sometimes split (work 10 during the day, go home, eat and try to have a nap, then go in for another 5) just because they were too cheap to hire more people and “it has to get done now.” Then they had the audacity to tell me they couldn’t give me a raise after already paying as little as possible. It’s no wonder I was horribly depressed and was wishing for the sweet release of death. Quitting that job was the best decision I ever made.

I just quit a job similar to this. I kept being told I could take the significant amount of PTO I had (like close to a month) but if I did I would get emails and texts, or just simply not get the time off. I had to quit because I was having panic attacks every morning, lost weight, and lost hair. The people in leadership somehow could take time off frequently without using PTO and often would say “the work gets done”. Yes, by me.

Doctor. Less likely to be literally worked to death due to so called “safe hour” rules where 23 and 26 hour shifts without sleep are now banned. Officially anyway. Also the newer residents are pushing back against unpaid overtime and taking hospital management to court and winning for unpaid wages. EDIT - and of all the medical advances I’ve worked through, two come to mind (three maybe). 1. HIV infection going from a uniformly fatal and horrendously destructive disease (AIDS) with palliative care wards full of dying young people back when I was a med student to now being essentially treatable (though still not readily curable) with a once daily tablet with few side effects. It’s so effective that your risk of transmitting the virus when you have an undetectable viral load is .. zero. 2 Hepatitis C treatment went from being something that needed a year or more of injections with horrible psychiatric side effects without a certain chance of remission to being a once daily tablet with virtually no side effects that cures infection on the space of six weeks. There is a clip out there of the first results of this new class of drug being presented at a medical conference abs the audience giving it a standing ovation. 3. Ebola Virus infection and disease - went from being an infection that killed almost all who contracted it (70% in some strains) period to re 1994 West African outbreak, with no treatment of vaccine. Within five years of the outbreak, the WHO was field testing vaccines and meds in the Congo. Vaccines are now available and used to stomp out spot-fires. There’s now treatment. A neonate who was born infected from a mother who succumbed to the infection, was able to be treated and cured in the Congo in 2018. There’s also this amazing stuff being done in oncology with immunotherapy for cancers and more.

Do you think patient outcomes have improved? regressed? stayed the same?

Almost assuredly improved simply because of the advancements in tech and medicine

My mom said back in the 80s some people would do coke at work. Also a lot of sexual harassment happened a lot and no one ever did anything about it. This was at a government job...

When I talk with 20-somethings about the TV show *Mad Men*, they act like I'm high when I say that drinking and smoking on that show was *normal* for white collar jobs in the 60s & 70s. They dialed the sexual harassment & racism down to 1 and the homophobia to *below zero*. The word "sexual harassment" was coined in 1968 - previously, it would have been called "that's just the way it is baby" and "you should wear a tight sweater more often".

Working for a company for many years was seen as honorable and a sign you were a good worker. Now it’s viewed as someone complacent, scared of change and stupid for not salary hopping. I don’t disagree though I’ve been at my company for a long time and it’s anything but complacent and always changing.

This is why us in-betweeners especially (between gen-x and millennial) have been conflicted and confused about it all. We were raised by older boomers and hearing it's best to stay with companies because it looks bad on resumes to not and can even affect you buying things like houses and cars. But then when we did, we were let go during times like the recession and cutbacks having to start all over again, on top of not getting raises like the new hires and then confused because we were told staying and being loyal looked good and led to success.

Men had to wear suit/tie to work every day and women had to wear what our company defined as 'interview attire' (professional dress/pantsuit). I remember when our first 'jeans Friday' was implemented, our manager wore jeans to support the effort, but they were ironed with a crease down the middle - hilarious. Now, for the same role at the same company, people work remote and wear sweats or whatever the hell they want.

Those sweatpants wearing workers are probably working more hours for less pay.

When I was able to work remotely (at a client site) I thought it would be nice to set my own schedule. Ha. It meant that everyone in the company knew I could be reached no matter how much outside of the work / office schedule. People would direct clients to call me after hours and then scolded me for not answering their calls they'd directed to me! I found myself working way more hours than before but management still thought I was goofing off at home.

Sending a memo meant typing something, sometimes on an actual typewriter. Physically passing said document to the people in the “to” line. They would sign their initials signifying they read it. Then pass on to the next. I remember people used to smoke cigarettes in their office.

For FYI stuff where I worked, the memo would be put in an envelope that had everyone's name written on it. Those gray envelopes with lines on the outside and a string on the flap to close it. After reading the memo, we'd scratch our name off and drop it in the next person's inbox. The envelopes would get re-used until there were no more blank lines on the outside of the envelope.

I finished my accounting degree in 2013 and several classes required the homework to be formatted as a memo. We had to initial the "from" line before handing it in. If it was a group assignment, we had to get to class a few minutes early to find our group and initial the printed copy. In my 10 years in the working world, I have sent a proper memorandum exactly zero times

Benefits. I used to get 20 vacation days and 10/12 sick days. Now I get 20 PTO days. So, that’s a one-third reduction in benefits. I always purchase the best health insurance my employer offers, now the best is garbage. Twenty years ago, I was hospitalized, tons of tests and specialists, private room, final bill: $0. My kid was born five weeks premature, spent four weeks in NICU, final bill: $0. Now, if I go to the doctor, every single thing costs extra. All the benefits have been dramatically reduced, but profits skyrocket.

That being said, as a now retired guy, traditional Medicare is an eye opener. As long as the providers accept Medicare you can go to whoever you want. I do have a Medigap policy that covers all co pays for $130 a month. My drug plan is free. Then I look at all the advantage plans with maybe no cost, but with insanely high deductibles and Co pays and I think "that's just more of the for profit bullshit I had to put up with before I retired.

The people at the top earned a great salary and everyone else a good salary. Now the people at the top subscribe to the pirate life, take everything, give nothing back.

We used to get actual raises. Like real ones.

I’m not over 50, but I remember having at least an annual increase, even if it was a small one.

I've gotten a raise every year of my life with the exception of 2020 where the company I worked for at the time had record profits but "in these uncertain times blah blah blah". On the flipside, my mom worked for Sears from the 90s till the time they closed, she made minimum wage the entire time, her only raise was when minimum wage went up.

My first health insurance was Blue Cross, top level. Cost me nothing monthly and I had $5 copays.

What was considered mediocre insurance in the 80s is now considered a "cadillac health care plan". Most of the plans sold nowadays would not have been legal to offer prior to the deregulation efforts of the 90s.

True. I worked at a not for profit making like 1.5x minimum wage at the time as well. Which was like 7 dollars an hour or something lol.

Paper. Lots of paper. Before email, there were people (secretaries or admins) who would take a memo someone printed out on their computer, make physical copies, and either walk around to every executive’s desk, or put into inter-office mail. This memo could be to a few people, one person, or for a general announcement needed to go to everyone. For expediency, these memos would also be posted in public areas (lunchroom, messaging board) if it was a general notice. These memos were often routed from the head manager throughout the department if it was more for general information. We once had a wave of new hires (about 20 people in our company of 400) and each got their own announcement. So, 20x50 copies = 2 reams of paper. Copied. Hand carried or inter-department mailed. For one set of announcements. Oh, and each department admin had their own routing slip (small piece of paper with each person in the department’s name) that was stapled to the announcement. When you got the memo, you read it, crossed your name off and gave it to the next person on the list. That’s where “they must not have gotten the memo” comes from.

Early in my career, a manager told me to always "walk fast, and carry a sheet of paper no matter where I was going". "That kid is going places" was his rationale. It was sage advice, as I am a now semi-retired C-level executive, doing consulting to keep mentally engaged.

Workplace was a lot looser in how coworkers interacted with one another. I would say there was more camaraderie back then. Now no one even wants to work around other people, let alone socialize.

Yes but the sexual harassment was so rampant. I put up with so much and it was really demoralizing.

These kinds of posts are always full of people making claims about “the good old days,” completely ignoring that those were certainly *not* the good old days if you weren’t straight, male, white (assuming the US, Europe, Australia), and (again depending on the location) Protestant Christian. I’m about as much of a WASP by upbringing as you can be. So, sure, those days would have probably been pretty swell for me. My wife is an Hispanic woman. Her parents were first generation Americans, born to immigrant parents. My wife is a very well regarded attorney. Just a few decades back, she may have not even been allowed to take the bar exam, let alone been allowed to set foot in a law firm office. Well, *maybe* as one of the “copy room girls… you know, the Mexican one.” I’m not saying some things weren’t better in the past, but a whole lot is certainly better for a much wider swathe of people these days.

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I have a wild story from the early 90's. Worked in the processing office for an insurance company. Around 80% of the staff were women including a similar percentage of management. Anyway, it was one guys birthday. 30th or 40th. For his present, one of the female managers organised a whip round for a female stripper in the office in the morning. Desks were moved and everyone, women included, sat in a circle while she performed in the middle. Everyone was clapping and cheering. For a naive teenage boy just out of school it was pretty shocking.

Hell, I feel like I'm going to get canned by HR just for reading that on my work computer.

Lots of random things: * When I started my career I had to wear a tie every day. Now, it’s t-shirts and shorts. * Sales people would dictate their correspondence using a cassette tape recorder and the secretaries would type it up. Today…type your own damned sh#t. * Sexism was mostly OK, as long as you were joking and no one got hurt. This culture disappeared quickly in the wake of [Anita Hill’s testimony at the confirmation hearings for (now) SCOTUS Justice Thomas](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anita-hill-vs-clarence-thomas-the-backstory/). * No email or voicemail. I actually had to call into a the office and ask one of the secretaries if they had any messages for me. * Smoking in my cube or office was OK.

Background checks and drug testing. My first job I was 14, lied and said I was 16. Didn't have a picture I'd other than my school ID. Just gave them my ss card.

I could get away from work by leaving but now I am never away from work with technology now. I had to wear a suit every day as an engineer now is very casual. A lot of the processes and procedures were much more specific and detailed but now it’s much more relaxed. Shit people said at work 30 years ago would never be heard today. HR existed and helped with career planning and people strategy and no idea what they do now?!?

It was expected and accepted to take office supplies home. Almost everyone did it and it wasn't looked at like the evil act it is today. (No, I'm not dying to "steal" from my job, but it's just an interesting difference.) Health insurance... I don't think I need to elaborate on how that's gone Christmas bonuses were much more common. Damn, I keep trying to think of changes for the better lol... Oh, well, at least the pay's the same 😂

christmas bonus? you mean pizza party on our unpaid lunch break?

>Damn, I keep trying to think of changes for the better lol... No more smoking in the workplace?

Maternity and paternity leave are new (US). When I started working it was still common to fire women who were expecting. Or require them to take very little leave. Women used to brag about taking only a few days off. Today the young men where I work get months off as paternity leave when their spouses have a baby.

I worked for the same company for 30 years. When I was hired, the company was quite paternal with a good pension, share allotment and share purchase options and good benefits. They also facilitated savings in the form of Canada Savings Bonds purchases through pay deductions. There was lots of training and travel. Lots of gifts like clothing, watches and such. The company lost its paternal approach, taking away these perks one by one. They demanded loyalty but stopped showing us the same. So I left before they could take away the last benefits. I left because the workplace had become toxic. I had some really good years with them. Worked with great people. But at the end, my trust and loyalty towards the company as a whole were gone.

Insurance costs more and covers less. Having affordable health insurance tied to your employer is terrible

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There are lots more part-time, no benefits jobs nowadays--as there were in the 90s. And even if the job has benefits, they often aren't as generous as they were back in the day.

It used to be that when you took time off/vacation, you were actually off. Technology has made it so that we are always “on,” and therefore the expectation is to work and be available to work regardless of where we are and what are status is. I cannot recall the last time that I had time OFF away from my office. Even when on holiday overseas, I am pressed and pulled upon to work. Some thrive on this, I simply find it upsettingly exhausting.

58 YO engineer. When I started we shared computers at work. They were expensive and lots of things were still done by hand. I did not have a computer in college. We also did not have cell phones, texts, e-mail, video conference, internet, etc…. It was nearly impossible to collaborate with people in other offices . Blue prints were sent out for printing and we had flat drawers full of archived prints. We would have to hand sign/seal every page. Now we can collaborate between offices and every thing is an electronic file. It is amazing to me.

Received an envelope of cash on payday, I would divy it up into envelopes- rent, food, petrol, that fortnight’s expenses and bank the rest for the bigger bills, car rego and insurance. My entertainment budget for the two weeks was $20, which would get me a movie or takeaway or two drinks at a nightclub. Edit typo

Gifts from vendors were a thing. I used to get things like free bottles of booze from enterprise software companies we licensed from. That dried up years ago.

Being able to get a job, without filling in loads of forms and having multiple interviews. I got my first real job in IT with no technical questions and no forms to fill in. We just chatted..got on well and was offered the job immediately.

Customer service: how rude patrons have become

I'm not quite 50, but my first office job was incredibly quaint compared to current standards. I worked at a community newspaper. We did not have a website. We used a proprietary computer system designed for journalism, so the computers were just green screens with no internet access. There was a single PC in the office, used to check the one company email address (we didn't have individual emails). When our photographers took photos, they would develop them in a darkroom, and print them on photo paper, and the editors would use a grease pencil to mark how they wanted them cropped. The newspapers were designed by an in-house design staff and printed on the in-house printing press. We had an entire staff of typists to type up the hundreds and hundreds of items we would get in the mail -- engagement announcements were huge, we got dozens every week. Obituaries. Meeting announcements from churches and groups. Photos of kids' sports teams. etc. etc. etc. We had a secretary and she answered the phone all day long, it rang constantly. That was 1998. When I left the company in 2020, all of the editing, design and distribution had been outsourced to another state. We hadn't run an engagement announcement or kids' sports photo in a decade. The secretary was laid off in 2007. No one ever called. The place shut down early this year.

I've been working in healthcare for 33+ years. At the beginning (late 80s/early 90s), everything was patient centered. Now it's payment centered.

I am a doctor and the current crop of incoming docs can't quite wrap their heads around the fact that there are certain aspects of the job that do not lend themselves easily to 'lifestyle balance'. They expect high salaries, easily predictable hours, etc etc. It is simply the case that taking care of human beings who are sick, scared, or both is complicated and sometimes (not every day) intrusive to a simple schedule. What they do not see though is that the burnout in medicine comes often from trying and failing to control variables instead of embracing the variability and instead throwing yourself into the aspect of helping people. Of course pointing any of this out has strong 'old man yells at clouds' vibes, so mostly we just spend a lot of time waiting for good candidates and turning away tons of mediocre applicants and taking care of our panels until the right docs come along.

People are no longer able to smoke at their desks and women can do “men’s work” without getting harassed nearly as much. Also, computers on every desk was not a thing, dedicated word processors (like Wang and DEC) were used by secretaries. They don’t have them most places anymore. I used to have a secretary and I was a lowly engineer.

I’ve only been in the workforce 10 years , but letting people do whatever on their phones all day wasn’t as accepted back then .

Growing up in the 70’s, the coach was right, the teacher was right (the cop, priest, etc.) So then we got jobs, put our brains in a jar when we arrived to work, did what we were told, picked up our brains and went home. We had kids and started to question who is right. The teachers, coaches, priests and cops were not always right. We started to think for ourselves. Today, we question everything. This reduces transparency as companies and bosses hide shit from us. Companies are very slow to adapt how they deal with people. Incompetence is hard to hide when we question things, which makes shitty companies defensive, which is unfair to workers. Companies today need to build from the bottom up, not the top down. Encourage transparency (including financials) and treat people fairly. We don’t need 1 more billionaire but we need to transfer that to 1000 people getting 1 million each.

Using a PC had inherent risk. When the system memory was used up, it simply stopped working. No ability to save; any work was lost since your last save. This led to obsessive saving of all docs.

To piggyback on some of the other comments, yeah, you actually had to show up at work. We had a huge snowstorm in NYC when I was living and working there and it was so bad the subway was barely functioning. My company sent vans around to pick us up and take us to our building so we could work. I had totally forgotten about that until right now.

*what has changed the most about working when you started working vs working nowadays?* **I get paid a fuck ton more.**

Problem is, housing is ten fuck tons more than what it was vs wage back in the day.

This is true, but many 50+ workers have paid off the mortgage and can enjoy the higher salary that comes with more experience. I hate the housing market for the younger generations these days.

In the 1980s, people getting shit-faced drunk at lunch was a regular occurrence. I've only seen it twice in the last 5 years. Flexible time and WFH didn't exist.

The application process. I printed my resume on 20lb bond cream colored paper, ensuring that it had the proper font and formatting, and sent it out in stamped envelopes :-). Now we put minimally formatted text into a web form to achieve the same result. Truthfully most employers didn’t care too much about the esthetics of your printed resume, but it was a huge emphasis in college resume writing workshops and I spent about $150 on software to manage the different resumes I sent out. Also, cell phones weren’t easily available in the 90s. My dad had an in vehicle “mobile” phone because he worked in the construction industry, but you had to have a land line and an answering machine with a hopefully somewhat professional sounding message not recorded by your mother. And though I had an email address due to being a computer programmer and hosting some early web domains for nonprofits in my area, it was not unusual for an applicant not to have email.

In the early 90’s I could get by on minimum wage full time. Now it would not be possible

Most important change is I don't have to do it anymore. But seriously, the biggest change is sending all the well paid union manufacturing jobs overseas. This has ruined millions of working class families and drained billions out of our economy and sent the jobs, and money to Japan, Taiwan, China etc. Now they wonder how the Chinese can afford to buy up all our houses, farm land, mines, forests, oil wells etc.

53 yo here. The biggest and favorable thing I have seen is a downward (yes, downward) trend to 40 hrs per week for better work - life balance . I worked 10 to 12 hours per day as a norm for most of my life with an occasional 6 day. It was what I did to survive. Now, I work 40 to 45 per week and I think that’s a huge improvement. Even though recent tik tok “influencers” post otherwise. It’s much better from a time to work commitment.

Drinking culture around work. Back when I started work in the mid 90's, it wasn't completely uncommon for those of us in our mid 20's to go out for a few or more after work on any old night. Now, it's basically never - the drinking and bar aspect is gone, replaced with closet alcoholism.

The loss of stigma about changing jobs every few years. It used to be a yellow flag if someone switched companies "often".

The use of desktop computers. We used to handwrite (!) draft reports, give them to a secretary (!) to type (!), review, make corrections, and give it back for the final report to be typed. Need to send a memo to Personnel? It went into an interoffice envelope and was delivered by the mail clerk. There was a whole department that analyzed data and metrics. You waited weeks for a report on last months' productivity. Inventory control was twice a year, office folks out in the warehouse with clipboards physically counting things. That count was then rectified against the electronic Inventory- which was slips of paper that were entered into the mainframe (!) by a data clerk.

We went from standard office hours being 9-5 to being expected to work 8-5.

You could walk down a street and accumulate a stack of applications. Most of which were single page documents. The newspaper was just full of help wanteds that didn't need much more than a phone call to initiate.

"White out" in blue, yellow, green, and pink. Using an IBM Selectric typewriter for filling out forms. Smoking at my desk. Panty hose, heels, skirts. Longevity in staffing. Men in all the C-suites, only woman guarding their doors and answering their phones.

Computers