I've been trying to figure out just when tech offices switched from outcast ugly nerds hunched over a server to tea sipping hipsters getting ready for a sack race before hitting the gin bar. Does anyone with a family over age 30 work at these places?
I'm a young (24) dev working in a very large org (tens of thousands large), I often feel like most people should never have been allowed to use a computer in their office.
Young or old.
Of course it's silly because of the global productivity gains. And it may just be my innate misanthropy which made me a nerd when I was younger now manifesting in this new form.
I'm already an old man annoyed by people my age and annoyed by older people. But truth is, I'm annoyed by most non technical people.
PS: I like discussing technics with people from non tech fields though, luthiers, masons, cooks etc...
Wow, really? Because GP describes my exact experiences.
I've job hopped for going on ten years now, and every slot I've inhabited was just a bunch of self-important, pendantic board game experts throwing their weight around, until they struck fear or induced mental fatigue, and wore you down to get their way. Nasty pieces of shit, barking like tiny dogs about syntactic preferences and vocabulary pissing contests, nothing more.
There were a handful of rare birds at one place, and when I say rare, I mean it, because even inside the company, there were all of maybe ten people that sharp, and there rest were posturing imposters.
Let's recount some of the worst. Fat nerds, pissed off about constant usage versus scooped variables, and getting in people's faces about JavaScript factoids that lack real value. Girls who code waiting to receive their daily pair-programming ass kissing session, because girl (that's right, TWO X chromosomes, AND I sit at a desk all day! Please, please, no autographs!). Meanwhile, numerous 40 and 50 year old women lumber about, chatting up fellow parents about their latest medical condition, news about their kids, or both. Walking talking dick-for-brains brogrammers talking about last years epic spring break bikini contests, while swiping through their phone's photo album brimming with tits and ass, as if they're TRYING to provoke the fat nerds into an active shooter incident. Non-binary conversation chores scuttling about with darting eyes, because they're walking around in their latest experimental underwear, dosed on horomones and looking for reasons to name drop pronouns and ask if you'll be attending the activist meeting on Wednesday. True robots that lead you to question if the machines are already walking among us. Tempermental, neurotic Jews. Culture shocked Indians that rush home at five sharp, to clock in at their arranged marriage. The extremely rare black guy, extroverting blackness as hard as possible to compensate for role he's expected to play in whatever buddy movie Mel Gibson can't do another sequel for. And, oh yeah, Asians because someone lied and told them programming was really about math. Also, godless communist Russians keeping a low profile because their smuggling malware payloads behind firewalls for Putin.
Is that everybody? Let's see... Who am I missing... Oh yeah, inept QA disembarking from the short bus, and autistic security "experts" incapable of engaging in conversation that doesn't involve Warhammer 40K trivia.
Funny reading this... Including myself, I know a handful of friends who ran BBSes and were all about this age. I'm pretty sure that we're all now in some form of IT job as well.
I work with a few of them actually. I loved college but these guys were cutting their teeth on tech when I was cutting mine on beer pong. All of them are too smart to ever think about a job description like that.
Think blue collar IT. In the old days, the grunt who watched mainframe batch jobs and fiddled with printers. If you see grumpy old people wearing overalls or non-khaki pants in a government or bank datacenter, you've spotted the operators.
Sometimes help desk types get categorized this way.
The BEST part was that some years later, the cops busted a coke ring that was operating out of the cafeteria. Lots of cafeteria workers and IT folks went down. Not me--I was at my desk with Campbell's Soup every day. I realized my post made me sound a pathetic loner. I actually made some friends there who I still lunch with today, though they are of course pushing retirement age now. Business IT was very different from now in the 1980's. At 24 I was by far the youngest on the mainframe team. I kept that distinction on into my early 30's at different employers, before "youngsters" in their late 20's started showing up. The mainframe IT guys/girls (at least in bank IT departments) of the 1980's tended to be older than 30, very much relics of the 60's and 70's. This means I also witnessed the Y2K bug being crafted. I was zapped quite a few times for carelessly allocating 8 bytes for date fields. "You're wasting 2 bytes carrying the century." My bad! I worked on the same system (for a different company) 20 years later and made good money helping upgrade all the dates. Things changed over the years, but in my experience, I have never been at a place that has any kind of food culture aside from ad hoc lunch groups that form outside the office. Certainly never any company-funded food.
Very true, cousin worked there in early 80's, probably not best source, but was first that jumped out and common knowledge amongst those old enough and into tech at the time to remember.
Was the aspect how they engaged with government bureaucracy and managed to in effect define a work culture that is so far removed from governmental bureaucracy, that you wonder what the early days was like.
reply