Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has an article about how cost cuts and AI are stripping the joy out of work life.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day and one of my former colleagues from Sun Microsystems noted how different things were back in the heyday of Sun.

For most of the company’s history, April Fool’s Day was a Sun tradition. It was expected that employees would come up with innovative pranks—such as putting Bill Joy’s Ferrari in a pond in a parking lot (on a stand, to keep it dry), turning an exec’s office into a golf course, creating a Govassic theme park (complete with animated dinosaurs), piercing CEO Scott McNealy’s office window with an arrow (to highlight his directive to put all the wood behind one arrowhead), and, of course, SunCLONE1, which supposedly cloned humans, including some of Sun’s more renowned engineers.

But it wasn’t for just one day a year. The Sun culture demanded hard work, but also believed employees should have fun at the same time. As a result, Sun people took on projects and goals that may have seemed ridiculous to outsiders—yet, more often that not, they delivered.

Not all that glittered at Sun turned to gold. The company made a series of strategic errors that eroded its market position and forced its sale to Oracle in 2010. But there are many former Sun employees who, 16 years later, still tell me that Sun was their favorite place to work in their entire career.

Scott McNealy’s final message to the Sun community thanked us for creating such a wonderful company that had accomplished so much for so long, and reminded us that when all else failed, we had at least kicked butt and had fun.

This week, Oracle laid off between 20-30,000 employees with an early morning email that didn’t include a thank you from the management team. I suspect those folks may feel it was their butts that got kicked. And having fun, it seems, hadn’t been part of the experience for a long time.

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