What was it like going to work in the 60s, 70s and 80s?

[CyclingInvestor]

Started programming for big aerospace in 1979. Worked mostly alone all day, FORTRAN assembly and machine code. Almost no meetings, overtime only when paid, pretty relaxing.

Retired 27 years later from financial industry. Very little had changed. Wore shorts instead of jeans, still bicycled to work most days, still very low stress.

Key decision - never let yourself get promoted. The poor managers were worked much harder than us programmers.

 

[Alan]

I'll say you were lucky. My second IT job the guy in the cube behind me smoked a pipe. Constantly. I didn't really mind smoke so much back then, although it bothers me now. But sometimes I could barely see to the other side of my 6 foot wide cubicle.

That was exactly how it was in our house growing up before I left home in '73. Both parents were heavy smokers, big "dirty" coal fire in an open grate to heat the house and I smoked with my mates outside in secret, but after I started going to grammar school at age 11 none of my new school friends smoked so I immediately stopped.

I was sooooo lucky that my workplaces were pretty much devoid of smokers.

 

[harley]

Key decision - never let yourself get promoted. The poor managers were worked much harder than us programmers.

That was my choice too. I followed whatever technical path I could, but refused to go into management. It wasn't so much the work in my case as it was the observation that when the RIFs came the managers got massacred, since they didn't really produce that much. It was easy to get rid of a couple managers, combine the groups under the one remaining manager. Of course, in a couple of years there's be too many chiefs again and they'd do it again. It worked for me. I enjoyed my work, and didn't have to deal with the stuff like evaluations and such. And towards the end of my career I was making significantly more than the people I was working for. That was fun.

 

[FreeAtLast]

There were many multi part forms and typewriters. A telephone on the desk. Clerks would type information on the forms and hand carry to,different departments during the day. Managers would make reports of what to manufacture or what to ship to a customer.
There were expeditors that just chased down shortages and delays. There was adding machines for,totaling accounting numbers and big green pads for doing manual spread sheets in pencil.

 

[Gill]

I started work in 1963 as an attorney working in the client area of a bank trust department. The top officers of the department had private offices and the rest of us were in an open carpeted area with executive type desks and an additional chair for meeting with clients.

The desk had nothing on it other than a telephone and a large ash tray. I smoked at the time, as did most others, and we were free to smoke whenever and wherever we wished. We had access to a steno pool of four girls, each with an electric typewriter on which they made several carbon copies. I was a little more advanced than some, and I dictated all my correspondence into a dictating machine and gave the tape and relevant material to the pool. Many of the other officers wrote out their letters by hand and gave them to the pool. In the back office there was one claculator, the type where the numbers spun mechanically. Of course, there were no computers, cell phones, pagers or any electronic devices. Also, copy machines were just coming into being and the bank had one on each floor that was carefully controlled by an employee to make sure you didn't do personal things on it. Many printings were done on mimeograph machines and punch cards were still in use.

In the 1970's I became head of a trust office and my predecessor had prevailed upon the bank to purchase an electronic calculator for his desk which only did basic math and cost about $400. I had the only one in the bank. It was about the size of a large book.

It wasn't until the 1980's when the office I was in acquired a desk top computer to be shared by all. Very few of us used it at the time. I often was out of the office calling on clients or developing new business and there was no way I could be reached without calling in. Smoking was still allowed at our desks and it wasn't until the '90's when this began to be prohibited.

By the time I retired in 1998 email was becoming into more common use and most employees had a computer terminal at their desk. Our boss could no longer smoke his cigars in the office and cell phones were coming into general use. I'm glad I retired before it became more complicated.
Bruce

 

[aja8888]

............and I smoked with my mates outside in secret, but after I started going to grammar school at age 11 none of my new school friends smoked so I immediately stopped.

At age 11+ where I lived in New England is when most school-age boys started smoking.

 

[Alan]

At age 11+ where I lived in New England is when most school-age boys started smoking.

Fortunately under age 11 I had so little money I couldn't smoke very many

 

[MichaelB]

Fortunately under age 11 I had so little money I couldn't smoke very many

Please see post 18

 

[Alan]

Please see post 18

And I expect that I am the only one on this thread that was actually working in Yorkshire during this time period

 

[dvalley]

Good stuff! it's fun to read your stories from the gone years. There's no doubt that technology has made our lives easier overall. However, I think folks directly managing technology have a more stressful life only because a system down for even 10mins is unacceptable. IT technology is no longer considered a nice-to-have but a necessity. It's amazing when I see even large companies that don't have business continuity plans in the event of a large IT outage but that's another topic altogether.

My other question that only a few answered was what other professions were in-demand and big back then, someone mentioned manufacturing which in many cases seems to have shifted off-shore nowadays. Another I heard was franchises and banking.

 

[papadad111]

I think 1987 through around 1996 or so was a very major change in office and work productivity and structure in USA -

Caused primarily the ushering in of truly personal (one pc per worker) computing - word processing, spreadsheets, personal email and other IT advancements drove productivity and caused lots of layoffs. Later in that decade of time came access to the world wide web at work, a shift in mentality to casual Friday's, conversations on work-life balance and flex time, awareness of sexual harassment, no smoking in the office, cubicles instead of individual offices, and a big reduction in folded and perforated paper !!!!

I recall that manufacturing was the "industry" to be in back then - production line work, engineering, product planning, plant management, accounting - there were many more administrative or data processing oriented jobs that paid a living wage. Fewer "service jobs" as we know them today. Every step of every job was more manual, less instant-real time, and more prone to inaccuracy. Jobs tended to be about producing something physical versus some intellectual property or virtual computer code or paper financial transactions or robot-produced cars.

Finance was mostly banking loans and maybe retail brokerage houses - stock trading was for "the rich". and heavily commission based and u paid a hefty commission - Now anyone can trade online for 5 bucks per trade etc etc. .

Retirement meant 35 years at same company and a defined benefit pension at the other side. That was quickly going away and the rise of the IRA and 401k happened in the mid-late 1980s it seems

Of course there are still lawyers and doctors and teachers and nurses and firemen and police men (and women) and retail and restaurant and accountants, sales and marketers, mechanics, etc.

 

[timo2]

I cleaning out some boxes recently, I came across pages of joke stories. Before the internet, people would route the joke stories on paper to groups of their co-workers, instead of emailing them now. Speaking of routing, I also found documents with 'routing slips' on them. These were to pass information your bosses wanted you to read amongst the staff.

 

[timo2]

But I still remember the smoking, particularly in the coffee room. Ugh!

Oh yes, the smoking. I once worked in an large office full of drafting tables with minimal partitions and people smoked cigarettes at their desks. all day. This was in the 1980's. I don't miss that.

 

[ducky911]

You could stop for for a few beers and drive yourself home.

 

[timo2]

You could watch Mad Men....

For the 60's and early 70's, exactly. I started watching the show Mad Men, and the tone and ambiance of the show so accurately reminded me of that work culture that I never made it past episode 4. I don't need to be reminded of the bad old days. I spent most of my early working career in the late 70's and 80's fighting with those type guys to try to get out with the old and in with the new. They were a stubborn lot.

edit: the only thing that saved me from being an organizational pariah was when Peter Drucker and his ilk came along, because that style of organizational philosophy seemed to make the last of the 'mad men' in my organization want to retire as soon as they could.

 

[MRG]

You could stop for for a few beers and drive yourself home.

I moved to Kansas in 1978. They sold 3.2 beer anywhere, as it wasn't an intoxicating beverage. Used to buy a 8 pack of pony 7oz. Millers, drank them going down I 35 perfectly legal, never downed them all. It wasn't a very smart idea, but legal.

 

[Amethyst]

Being referred to as "a girl" or worse, "the girl" and noticing that men my age were not called "boys."

Secretaries calling me by my first name, while men of same rank were called "Mr."

Cigarette smoke everywhere, and the smokers in angry denial of the harm their second-hand smoke was doing to everyone.

Amethyst

 

[Lakewood90712]

1970's and 80's, remember real managers and supervisors, who got there by ability and hard work , who also used practical hings. Not my first job, but in the early 80's

First job at "Mega-corp" new guy in a remote engineering lab building 100 people , large plant (10,000+) . The lab manager assigned me to deliver the internal mail within the building for a week in addition to running a small lab. I was thinking Good Greif how petty..... Extremely useful , met virtually everyone in the building !!!!! I doubt many managers today have such simple , practical things like that in thier bag of tricks

EDIT: Oh forgot to add , The engineers stuck upstairs in a large common office pairs had to share a telephone on a swinging metal stand , although the each got their own personal stapler and ashtray. Cigars were prohibited in the office, but not in many of the labs,

 

[Gill]

You could stop for for a few beers and drive yourself home.

Not all that long ago it was perfectly legal to drink while driving, as long as you weren't intoxicated. A friend of mine still talks of seeing a guy in a pickup making a hand signal, signalling a left turn with a can of beer in his hand. It was common practice when leaving a cocktaial party to go out for dinner to give everyone including the driver a "traveller" - a drink to hold them until they get to the restaurant. In Florida, they still sell single cans of beer popped into a brown paper bag just the size of the can - a beer for the driver on the way home from work.
Bruce

 

[Tom52]

I started my full time working career in 1974 just out of college. On my desk was basically a phone and an old mechanical adding machine and a calendar/scheduler. We could make direct outgoing phone calls but all incoming calls came thru an operator/receptionist. No voice mail. If someone called and I was out of the office the operator/receptionist took a message. Our group of 5 or 6 people included a VP and his secretary. No email and no fax at that time. If you needed to communicate by other than the phone you wrote your own letter and submitted it to the secretary for typing and copying with carbon copies. Of course the VP dictated his letters to the secretary and she used short-hand. There was a huge number of filing cabinets required as nothing was stored electronically.


I do remember the smoking in the office and the off color jokes and comments that would never be tolerated today. People were great to work with, maybe because there didn't seem to be the stress and drama there is in today's workplace.


Thinking back to that time seems like a hundred years ago, but they were good times even if the work didn't get done as fast and efficiently as today.

 

[aja8888]

In Florida, they still sell single cans of beer popped into a brown paper bag just the size of the can - a beer for the driver on the way home from work.
Bruce

Every gas station in Houston (and maybe Texas) still has an iced-down cooler full of beer in the middle of the open space by the checkout counter.

 

[braumeister]

My other question that only a few answered was what other professions were in-demand and big back then.

I think nursing was a high demand profession even back then.
My uncle was a geologist. He spent his whole career with the U.S. Geological Survey, so he was a government employee. But he was constantly being recruited by oil companies, so I would say that was probably a high demand profession.

Here's an interesting look at the most popular college degrees.
The Most Popular Bachelor's Degrees: A Historical Look

 

[shortstop14]

I remember my desk in the late '70s piled with unit record stuff - punch cards, printouts, racks for interpreters with cables everywhere. Spending hours on the card sorter, collators and keypunch machines. Handwriting technical documentation for the secretary to type.

Our workspaces were basically bullpens full of desks, each with a phone and filing cabinets. Funny, now I hear that at my old office they're going back to the old bullpens as part of agile development - but at least without the clouds of smoke.

And I really related to Office Space and beating the copy machine into submission - the early copiers had really finicky paper feeds.

 

[Amethyst]

It's hard for me to answer "what professions were big" back in the 1980's because I was in a specialized program and had little contact with other professions. It seems to me that engineers and lawyers were a big deal back then. At least, people acted like they were. I seem to recall that computer scientists were not yet given the respect they deserved and were referred to as programmers - no matter their skill level.

Amethyst

 

[ABQ2015]

Being referred to as "a girl" or worse, "the girl" and noticing that men my age were not called "boys."

Secretaries calling me by my first name, while men of same rank were called "Mr."

Amethyst

As an new engineer starting as a GS-5, I was assigned to work with an older man who was in his 70's - retired in place. My boss wanted for someone to understand what the guy did in case he retired or died at his desk. The older man would never look directly at me but would look at my chest with this slight smile on his face which was very embarrassing. And yes, the secretaries treated the female engineers like the rest of the "girls" but were very respectful to the men, even the young men. And some of the secretaries were resentful.

On those Miller High Life 7 oz "ponys", I love those but can no longer find them. I don't always like to drink an entire beer.