I worked at IBM as a student intern in the mid 80s and at the Royal bank of Scotland.
Process at these companies was slow and waterfall. Once worked with a group porting mainframe office type software to a minicomputer sold to banks; they had been cranking out C code for years and scheduled to finish in a few more years, and the developers were generally convinced that nothing would ever be releasable.
The people were smart and interesting - there was no notion of doing software to become rich, pre-SGI and pre Netscape, and they all were people who shared a love of solving puzzles and a wonder that one could earn a living solving puzzles.
IBM had a globe spanning but internal message board sort of thing that was amazing, conversations on neurology and AI and all kinds of stuff with experts all over the world.
I also worked at the Duke CS lab around 1990, but it was hard to compare to companies because academia is generally different. People did the hard and complex stuff that they were capable of, and the grad students operated under the thumb of their advisor.
Wages were higher than for example secretarial jobs, but not life altering for anyone, but people didn’t care so much.
Process at these companies was slow and waterfall. Once worked with a group porting mainframe office type software to a minicomputer sold to banks; they had been cranking out C code for years and scheduled to finish in a few more years, and the developers were generally convinced that nothing would ever be releasable.
The people were smart and interesting - there was no notion of doing software to become rich, pre-SGI and pre Netscape, and they all were people who shared a love of solving puzzles and a wonder that one could earn a living solving puzzles.
IBM had a globe spanning but internal message board sort of thing that was amazing, conversations on neurology and AI and all kinds of stuff with experts all over the world.
I also worked at the Duke CS lab around 1990, but it was hard to compare to companies because academia is generally different. People did the hard and complex stuff that they were capable of, and the grad students operated under the thumb of their advisor.
Wages were higher than for example secretarial jobs, but not life altering for anyone, but people didn’t care so much.