[jerome-jh]

When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.

I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.

[Frieren]

> When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings.

When I worked 25 years ago, I had the same experience. But software was way simpler than today. The scale and complexity of current software requires a level of organization and communication that was not needed with simpler needs.

Most software run on a PC with probably no internet connection. Updating the software required to send discs by mail. Everything was slower, and probably more robust. Maybe banking was closer to what we have now, but it was still slower and there were way less transactions.

In contrast, my last 3 jobs required backend services available 24/7 to serve millions of users worldwide. We had many data providers, and we provided services to dozens of big corporations. We had teams dedicated to just integrate to all the partners, wallets, data providers, etc.

Increased complexity requires more communication and more meetings, and more time dedicated to synch all that development. If anyone wants old-style ways of working, with more time coding and less meetings I would recommend to go to small companies with limited reach. Their problems are going to be easier managed by a few developers that can focus on creating new things instead of getting up to date with all the complexity that a big corporation requires.

[nuancebydefault]

25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We even had distibuted source code version control, though it was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using SERI) overnight.

Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at work. Working is often a social business and activities like rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with living people works wonders for me. It should happen even more.

The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were writing yet another framework that they personally came up with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong thing, making too clever things or over engineering.

[everdrive]

>but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often.

This is a very important point, and it's crucial for people to understand that merely making something more available can have an outsized effect.

[_ea1k]

TBH, I think covid and the push towards Zoom and others had a similar outsized effect. It made synchronous meetings nearly "free" for many more people.

[makeitdouble]

> Managers just trusted you for doing your work.

They didn't. But they also had no viable option to monitor what you're doing and check on it every day.

IMHO white collar workers at that scale was a relatively new phenomenon, and that moment of peace sure didn't last that long.

[SoftTalker]

Pretty similar to my first couple of jobs. We didn’t even have email. To document when something was done, we printed a diff and wrote a memo, which went into a file (i.e. a folder in a drawer) for that project.

[p_v_doom]

I am working in a company that never did the whole agile thing and stuck to project management approaches from the last century. I never thought that Id ever miss Safe and crunchy SCUM. I think a lot of those problems you describe are less to do with agile, and more to do with communication technology,