I live for “OK, Boomer” from someone who has no idea what the world actually looked like in 1955 or 60..
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Getting Old
- Thread starter Major Seven
- Start date
My parents had an apartment above Sunset Blvd near the Brown Derby restaurant, Famous "Sunset Strip" on border of Hollywood and West Hollywood, before I was born, probably around 1950 or 51. Told me people used to dress in Black Tie to walk the strip and go to the clubs at night.
I don't want to try to describe what people dress in now to walk what's left of the Strip. Whatever you can find In a dumpster is now considered chic there.
Of course, all those kids down there in ‘66/‘67 looked like a bunch of clowns and freaks to some old codger back then, damn hippie weirdos. Then the 80’s hair metal years…did you ever see “Decline Of Western Civilization pt.2”? Buncha S&M hookers, I tell ya, and the women looked like sluts too.
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,164
- 256,832
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
I lived on Sycamore, one half block north of Hollywood Boulevard, from 81 - 82
and by this point in life, it's very hard to impress me with novelty.
and by this point in life, it's very hard to impress me with novelty.
When I was 44, I was at my peak of gigging with multiple bands, averaging 3 gigs a week while still holding down a day job.
While in grad school one of the software engineering classes I took discussed how to make solid bug free programs. None of the software guys I worked with did any of that stuff. Most hardware guys like me wrote much more efficient code, because ours was used to design and test chips. A bug in our code meant a bug in the chip.
Last edited:
The area there has gone through so many phases since I moved out here in '84. It didn't used to be bad, even a little trendy, then it got weird, then dangerous. Now many of the more stable population has moved out and many houses are rented as party houses. I just stay away.
When I bought my Rumble100 I was considering a GK112 but passed on it because the only authorized service center was in Hollywood. Nuff said.
Not to mention we had only 600k or so of memory to use.
And if you used more than 20 meg of disc space UNIX flagged you a disc hog.
All this stuff was really expensive.
This post has made me think. I can agree that I too probably reached my apogee by age 44, in terms of my creative contribution in the job market and coming up with new things. After that I was just reusing bits and pieces of things I had already thought of or experienced. That said, I think I became more efficient after that at assembling this bits and pieces, using less effort, and also better at communicating or implementing the resulting products. I can see the point made about software. I worked with some of the biggest software giants and if you looked under the covers most of their code was assembled out of old pieces (sometimes crap) that were repurposed. Then the networks came up every smart programmer had his own library of routines and pre-canned do-things that they guarded, and assembled into executable modules to meed their design parameters. Were these things efficient? No, but they got done quickly and the point was to bring things up quickly, deliver new releases quickly, and deal with bugs later. I also agree that the most efficient programmers were the ones on the operating system, later the chip side. Couldn't easily fix their mistakes later.
Interesting how all these examples relate to the world of bass playing, but they do. We all do these same things in our playing. Now we call it "language." Instead of compiling programs, it's "composing."
We are just human computers after all.
My first coding job was writing in assembler for a Z80 processor with 64K of memory. 1985 maybe? I was designing a network router (this was when Ethernet was a brand new thing), still hand drawing the schematics on a drafting table and programming the Z80 was part of that design.
I’m sure the clubs on the Strip were fantastic, for those white enough to get in.
Then by 1990, you could browse the Darpanet (albeit at the system prompt), or with a text only browser. 1992 or 3, the first graphical browser Mosaic.
We are where we are now in only 40 more years.
edmidlifecrisis
Registered mediocre bass player
I lived in West LA from '78-'85. Same here. I was never a metal fan (wrong generation) but I had a friend there I worked with in the late '70's who fancied himself a manager/promoter. He was managing local hair/metal bands. I saw many of these bands of his in the Sunset/Hollywood/etc clubs back then as I felt obligated to attend the bands he was managing. Yikes those were not fun!!! Not a fan of that genre.
On the other hand here's another true LA story I lived: another good friend at the time in West LA was trying to crack the music scene with solo acoustic shows (he was pretty good) and playing in a couple of rock bands and I tried to go to as many of his shows as I could. One of the bands he was in had Val McCallum in it, Val was young (now he's a well known pro session guitarist) actually we all were young then! His mom and stepdad used to attend the shows and stay in the edge/shadows of the clubs they played. Imagine being in a dark corner of a dark nighclub and running into Charles Bronson!!!!! That happened to me a few times!
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,164
- 256,832
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
... I am laughing in the recollection that, to my fellow employees at DEC, I was the mystery employee. I had a desk, a phone with a working extension, and nobody in that office had ever seen me. And when I think about it, that is a life pattern with every employer. If I was in the office, there was something wrong. My billable rates are field rates.
What's important is my fine employer returns the favor
What's important is my fine employer returns the favor
- Oct 22, 2015
- 21,164
- 256,832
- Disclosures
- I am an affiliate for Ari Cap.
I lived in West LA from '78-'85. Same here. I was never a metal fan (wrong generation) but I had a friend there I worked with in the late '70's who fancied himself a manager/promoter. He was managing local hair/metal bands. I saw many of these bands of his in the Sunset/Hollywood/etc clubs back then as I felt obligated to attend the bands he was managing. Yikes those were not fun!!! Not a fan of that genre.
On the other hand here's another true LA story I lived: another good friend at the time in West LA was trying to crack the music scene with solo acoustic shows (he was pretty good) and playing in a couple of rock bands and I tried to go to as many of his shows as I could. One of the bands he was in had Val McCallum in it, Val was young (now he's a well known pro session guitarist) actually we all were young then! His mom and stepdad used to attend the shows and stay in the edge/shadows of the clubs they played. Imagine being in a dark corner of a dark nighclub and running into Charles Bronson!!!!! That happened to me a few times!
By 82-83 I am totally inured to celebrity.
Our band is the New Riders of the Purple Sage vibe, and we play to hippies in the San Fernando Valley. By day, I work for Hearst and carry a LAPD press pass. Yes, well, newspapers, just getting started and am deputized by the LAPD for one photograph that made Chief Gates very happy. I still have that pass; there is no expiration date. My boss at the cop shop told me this is very unusual ...
" Ever been arrested?"
nope
"Come down to Parker Center, we'll roll your prints."
and it is done.
<shrug>
You are describing one of my recurring nightmares. Early 80s I worked for Andersen consulting, my office had 500 consultants. In my dream I'm still there but nobody knows I work there and I haven't had a raise or a performance evaluation, or salary adjustment, in 30 years. I cannot find my office or remember who my secretary is, and I'm certain I'm about to be fired because I'm not billing.... I am laughing in the recollection that, to my fellow employees at DEC, I was the mystery employee. I had a desk, a phone with a working extension, and nobody in that office had ever seen me. And when I think about it, that is a life pattern with every employer. If I was in the office, there was something wrong. My billable rates are field rates.
What's important is my fine employer returns the favor
There are self-proclaimed "software engineers" and then there are software engineers who have earned their iron ring. In Ontario "engineer" is a protected term: if you haven't earned the iron ring, you can't hold a position with engineer in the title.
My first career was with a multinational at a software development lab in Ontario. We worked with "software engineers" in the States who were the equivalent of our software developers. The titles didn't matter, the enterprise software updates that we shipped on a quarterly basis and called "Fix Packs" were internally referred to as "Break Packs". I wasn't a tester, but I found and reported an alarming number of issues while simply trying to use the software as documented.
All this to say: there are legit software engineers who strive to maintain standards equivalent to those found in mechanical or electrical engineering. But they are few and far between compared to the code monkeys who throw whatever they found on StackExchange towards a problem (or, increasingly, whatever an AI generated for them).
I'm still a ways off from retirement but I reserve the right to yell at clouds!
I'm afraid for the same. I cope with acceptance; this isn't my world anymore
I still look at the clock so I can document how long even mundane tasks take.
Last edited:
I think what you are describing is true of many aspects of services industries, some have referred to it as disintermediation, where services and related functions get broken up into smaller parts. Those parts get farmed out to the lowest cost option, wherever or whoever it might be. Things then get reassembled to form the final product or service, but perhaps not to the same standards achieved when it was all done in a linear, truly integrated process. I experienced frustrations similar to yours in my niche, management consulting. I went into that profession with a masters plus a CPA plus 2.5 years experience in finance, and was trained incessantly by my employer, the largest professional consulting organization in the world. In my first 2 years I had over 2,000 hours of classroom-delivered training in how to be a consultant, plus technical training. 12 years later I had worked for three of the top consulting firms, and went out on my own. I linked up with others who had similar training, and for awhile it went well. As time went on, more and more of our project team members were simply people out of a job filling time and contributing their skills acquired at their previous job. They had no training in how to be a consultant. By the time I retired I wouldn't have hired 75% of the people I was working with, had lost almost all control of the projects I was working on, and just felt the standards had gone to hell. Rant over.......
