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As an almost 50 year old who has worked on many cool things I'll weigh in.

I get very tired of seeing the same mistakes in different guise. I don't get the youth culture of today and don't like it: including PC oriented culture and other media specific ideas designed to focus perception. I recognize patterns rather than specifics. I look at big picture and am careful about introducing paradigm shifts. I care about efficiency and ease of use, scalability and other ideas at inception of a project. If I am not respected for my approach and ideas I leave.

I'm older now myself (closer to 40 than 50, but well past "young"), and I don't think I meant what you think I meant.

"I don't get the youth culture of today and don't like it: including PC oriented culture and other media specific ideas designed to focus perception."

"PC oriented culture" just seems like expecting people to treat everyone with respect, and I think that's an improvement. Our industry hasn't always been good at that, but it has nothing to do with productivity. The old-timer I talked about wasn't racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise an asshole...he just liked to be able to close his office door and think really hard about things. He worked well with others; treating the women and brown folks in the office just like anyone else. Why would that be a source of contention?

And, I have no idea what "other media specific ideas designed to focus perception" could possibly mean. I know all the words, but they don't add up to anything, as far as I can tell.

These were my comments alone as a 50 year old in addition to your narrative; not in correlation but in comparison.

PC in this context meaning behaviors for the sake of change willy-nilly (think about the injection of feminine instead of masculine pronoun that was|is fashionable). I see the mercurial aspect of PC culture as reactive and dismissive and dislike it intensely.

Everyone these days seem to have some form of progressive agenda and most change is packaged in some media that makes it seem innocuous and correct in an engaging and entertaining way that would have been nearly impossible when I was a young man. In fact(as McLuhan might say) the media is the message. Chomsky is quite insightful in my opinion as to how the medium and vocabulary restrict available concepts.

"think about the injection of feminine instead of masculine pronoun that was|is fashionable"

This seems to have settled, after a few years of mild confusion, on everyone agreeing to just use non-gendered "they/them" when the gender of the subject is unknown. Pretty easy, it has historical precedent, and it can't possibly exclude anyone from the conversation. Seems like progress, to me. Where's the harm in making your docs about everybody rather than just men?

I guess I just don't get the hostility toward inclusiveness as a value in our communities/companies/etc. It costs me literally nothing and might make someone else feel more welcome to participate in the things I'm working on. It just seems like a win with no down side.

You didn't tackle any of the real criticism in my message.

You remark on a discrete symptom (which is a precursor) and you affirm it's essential importance to your life without any historical consciousness. And that is my basic gripe with PC culture: sensitivity to every little thing that you feel hurts you or impairs you or makes you feel included. Hell is other people, get over yourselves.

I couldn't make much sense out of the rest of your comment; it seemed vague and a little paranoid. So, I latched onto the one concrete thing in your comment, assuming it was demonstrative of what you were criticising.

"sensitivity to every little thing that you feel hurts you or impairs you or makes you feel included. Hell is other people, get over yourselves."

That seems simple when you're white and male, and the entire industry (and much of the world) treats your existence within it as a default and correct thing. I try to assume honest intentions when someone tells me something I've said/done is hurtful, and try to remember not to say/do it again.

The backlash against "PC culture" just comes off as really entitled and overly sensitive, to me (which is, ironically the same thing anti-PC people accuse everyone else of being). I don't know how to resolve that clash. I, personally, want to be part of solutions to problems rather than an impediment.

I view the imbalance in our industry as a problem worth solving; welcoming more women and under-represented people of color into our industry as equals (even when it means making changes to how we do things and how we talk about things) is a net positive for everyone. It's just increasing the pool of talent devoted to solving the world's technical problems and that can't be bad.

But, it sounds like I still may not be understanding your position. Can you provide another concrete example of what you're talking about? I noted your preference for big-picture rather than details earlier, but I'm clearly not grasping the big picture you're drawing...I need more details to understand where you're coming from

You like to characterize as vague (or worse) what can be reasonably inferred or researched and have a knack for constructing positions by pleading ignorance: which makes it simpler when creating straw men and redirecting|reducing conversation scope.

You sound naive and well meaning but I think that is artifice. Your comments reflect the essentially reactive nature of the PC movement (to me) which is to reject what you find distasteful and inject whatever you believe in (edit: with no real historical consciousness).

Do you believe that experienced white men should be displaced (by default) by persons of color or women in a profession because of skill equivalency? Is there a ratio for that displacement? Is it based on merit or is it based on something else?

> It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity.

I don't see how this is paradoxical. It makes just as much sense that better focused time, not "crunches", will increase productivity as the fact that offices will increase productivity. Same thing goes for telecommuting. The worship of overtime and 60, even 80 hour weeks is one of the big reasons I'm not in industry.

It is paradoxical in the sense that "more time working" should equal "more output", but most of us know that past a certain point the result of "more time working" is worse code that has to be fixed, leading to overall less productivity.

I'm not saying "more time working" equals more output. I'm saying there is a belief that it does, even among some people who should know better. The office I was working in did have occasional crunch times, and they'd put in extra hours; sometimes maybe it was necessary. But, old-timer I was talking about didn't really participate. His part of the job would have already been done earlier in the week.

> [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...]

I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".

Swipe keyboard perhaps?

Typos happen. I fixed /bug/big/ (I guess at the same time you responded), but didn't see "nothing" until after my edit link went away. You are correct in your interpretation.

I think you've got Facebook and Google reversed. Facebook is famously all open-plan. Google has a mix of open plan areas and mini 4-person offices with doors, along with other configurations.

I don't consider a 4-person office to be an "office"; that's "open", to me. Google does have lots of meeting rooms and the like, so as I understand it, most developers can find a private workspace most of the times when they might need it. So, it's probably not awful to work at Google.

If facebook is even more "open" than Google, I'm amazed anybody ever gets any work done, but obviously they do, so I may just be more reclusive than most tech people when I work.

I heard (in Seattle area) that MS office are on the way out, depending on the team you're on :/

Maybe someone can confirm...

Yes, our buildings at MS are transitioning to open space. We now have a large room for each team. Everyone has a height-adjustable desk that can be moved around within the room and a pair of good quality headphones.

Each room has its own small meeting room for devs to have long design discussions, and a larger conference room that is shared with the room next door. For making phone calls, there are really nice phone booths in the hallways.

That's discouraging. MS did a study to determine offices improved productivity, so what happened?

Open office = more dense work areas = profit

That is certainly the idea in general but it will depend on how badly it affects worker productivity. It's just strange to see a company do a study, prove that offices produce the best results and still go with a measure that presumably isn't cost effective (else the initial study should have concluded that the difference was well within tolerable loss).