If I understand your reply correctly, you mean to say that it's acceptable to be a total douchebag as long as you are "talented"?
I read the point that being "professional" is also about being able to do good programming work and take responsibility for what you do technically - not just appearing at the office at the right time, being courteous to other people and accepting HR buzzwords and policies and opinions without question.
The problem here is I think people have different definitions of "wildly unprofessional behavior".
They are skills you have to develop though and young people will make mistakes as they figure out what the boundaries are. If you are fortunate enough to have a mentor in the business, you have a huge advantage.
Appearing at the office at the right time is unnecessary just for appearance's sake, but can be a factor in respecting and empathizing with coworkers, for example to be available for questions. It is usually not that important in the grand scheme of things.
This can be as subjective as the word professionalism. People always use their own value judgement in these things - whether it's deciding if something is professional, or not, or if something is respectful, or not.
Sometimes, you do have to just follow rules, for the sake of it, because there is no standard in personal value.
It doesn't matter if you get your work done. There are a hundred other people who can get your work done and do it without being a dick.
Note: I'm not calling _you_ a dick. I just vehemently disagree with anyone who thinks they get to be a dick (or, more generally, act however they please) just because, to borrow terminology from earlier comments, they're "talented".
If you want to pin down a concept, you can't just deal with easily categorised instances - the real distinctions exist in the grey areas.
There's a multi-dimensional gradient between polite and impolite, and where the thresholds lie is determined by personal value. Pick points far enough to either side, and most of those thresholds will fall within - but it is in the "grey area" that they disagree. That is why an arbitrary, but unambiguous threshold is needed as a standard.
However, those are all things that I've personally seen these so-called "talented" individuals do, because they think their talent makes them immune from criticism. And, sure, that's just my own, anecdotal experience, but the very fact that it's also a widely-held stereotype of these types of people, I would wager that I'm not alone in having been confronted with these types of people.
This isn't a gray area. This is the basic idea of being professional, and it holds true between places where a suit and tie is mandatory and places where you can bring your dog to work every day.
And to be absolutely clear, this is a very Western-centric view. I simply _don't know_ enough to comment on how this applies to more Eastern work environments.
To what degree tech does, or should, value "professional"/polite behavior is a different topic.
This are unambiguous when you are interacting with people before you have established your own norms. It's possible for a healthy team to have a dynamic where cursing out bad code is completely acceptable, while cursing a person is not. The camaraderie built around breaking a social norm (cursing) can offset shock at violating the norm. However, that should change or be re-evaluated every time that norm is disturbed.
It's also possible to go 'too polite', to the point where criticism goes unsaid because you don't want to offend. That's just as toxic of a culture, it just leads to a much slower demise than the flame-outs you get from more visceral bad behaviors.
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>This isn't a gray area.
Argument from extremes.
Whenever the topic of "Well, what do they mean by professionalism?" you'll invariably get a response stating something really obvious, and pointing out people who violated those obvious norms.
Since I didn't, and don't expect to, violate them, this kind of comment is almost useless. Why? Because in no place where I've worked is the use of the word "professionalism" limited to those domains.
You will get people who do everything you said still be called unprofessional. Which is why the question becomes "Well, what does professional mean?" and invariably someone will give your response and we get nowhere.
I worked for a tutoring agency once. Our boss was trying to tell us that we should be careful not to make the student feel like a moron because they couldn't solve a problem we tutors found easy. What does that mean? He demonstrated it to us by saying "Well, when someone asks you an easy question, don't say 'Wow! You really can't do such a simple question?!'"
That demonstration was really helpful. We all went back and occasionally said to a student "Sure I can help you solve this trivial problem".
(No, of course we didn't. The point was to someone who wasn't aware, this approach would be totally appropriate for a tutor to do because he's not making explicit fun of the student).
People who leave with 2 week's notice have been called unprofessional.
People who don't reply to pointless emails have been called unprofessional.
Just open up an "Ask HN" thread and ask people what crazy things have been called "unprofessional" in their work place.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the others. Saying "Be professional" is as useless as "Be cool" or "Be good".
If a company doesn't have proper guidelines and training on what they expect their employees to do, then that company doesn't value professionalism. Not providing guidance and then pointing fingers is pretty low.
For better or worse at the forefront of your field and at the top of the social ladder the rules are different.
It's a sliding scale. The better one's results are the bigger douche one can be and get away with it. And that's a very good thing because it ensures that most people who know that they are not that fantastic at producing great results go out of their way to avoid being total douche bags.
Or be more "professional", but that's boring af.