There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation.

In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.

I worked for a guy that converted half the office into a store with windows so shoppers could "watch us work" ... things haven't changed much, for non-FAANG.

Is a windowless basement that much worse than the open officies of Facebook?

I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a well lit factory with tons of noise like this: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.

I worked there a few years ago. It was almost always easy to reserve a room if you wanted more quiet or more privacy.

Offices were pretty much for managers. The standard was (high-walled) cubicles. Although a lot of the people involved here were in hardware so a lot of their work was in open labs.

Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was somehow more enlightened than previous generations general working environments?

People are mostly the same. It's just the cultural context that shifts, and mostly that changes slowly, even when tech changes rapidly.