"Funding was stable, the way that Bell Labs was funded was that a very small tax was applied to any time you made a phone call in the United States a tiny slice of the money involved would go to Bell Labs to improve future telephone service and so that helped that meant that you could count on having revenue to support research for a long time, the organization was very stable, people stayed there for many many years & the company itself took an exceptionally broad and long-term view the job was to improve communication systems and that’s going to be a problem for a long time so almost anything you wanted to work on was arguably relevant to building better telephone systems and so that meant the company was not run by the quarter of a year it was run by multi-year period and all of this led to an environment which is also very cooperative and just plain fun. People enjoyed being there.."
-- Brian Kernighan Unix: History and Memoir, Chapter 9 is pure gem Legacy -> Technical, Organization, Recognition, Could history repeat?
The term “sociotechnical” seems to have gotten a bit or renaissance lately, which is a great thing given all the positive impact it has had on many organisations and their workers around the world over the years. It also seems to have gotten some traction outside the academic circles this time after being developed and pushed from there mostly using action research since its humble beginning in the post-war British coal mines. It is an entry into systems thinking for many, with its idea about joint optimisation of both the technical and social aspects of an organisation. A common example is setting up the team topology to match the service architecture in an attempt to cater for negative effects of Conway’s law. This is all well and good, but if we think about it, viewing the modern organisation as a sociotechnical system is a bit of a tautology; all organisations have social and technical elements that people deal with on a daily basis. As with systems thinking, the value of sociotechnical system design is more about perspective and understanding rather than any specific outcome. There is so much more to sociotechnical design than DevOps and team setup that we need in order to cope in our increasingly complex and hazardous “digital coal mines.” -- Systems thinking in general and open sociotechnical systems