It's pretty ridiculous to me that this even needs to be said. "We need to make a conscious effort to be professional in a professional environment". What is happening to our culture...
In this case I feel it's a particularly bad combination of the environment of a video game company and young male employees coming directly out of college, which especially in the US seems to be daycare for adults.
No part of the pipeline seems to teach these individuals what it means to behave professionally in a workplace environment, and often software companies do indirectly promote it by purposefully mixing up private and work-life (drinking at work, casual attitude, no hierarchies etc..)
As much as people lament corporate culture these days, I prefer it a great deal to the arrangement described in the post.
I remember thinking that I'd never seen anything like this kind of behaviour when I was young and first starting out -- well never mind that the startups I worked at would never send new grads to a conference. That was a privilege (and responsibility) for someone with more experience. But I remember thinking that nobody would do that.
Since I've returned to working as a programmer, I've noticed this kind of thing rearing its ugly head more and more. The idea of being a "professional" has changed quite a bit. For one thing, there is a lot more money in the profession and this has attracted a very different set of people to the industry. Back when I first started out, if you said you were a computer programmer, people kind of looked at you in pity. Now this is the "get rich quick" job. People who would have previously entered into more normal businesses with an aim to climbing the ladder into executive positions are looking more and more at programming as a good entry point.
Not only that, but the rise of the internet has also given rise to the programmer rock star. So not only money, but also fame is on the line. I think especially at a well known game studio, people are lining up not for money, but for status. This attracts a completely different sort of person than "Come join our startup that's writing new accounting software for airlines". I think that rock star attitude brings with it the rock star behaviour.
The thing is, I don't think this attitude is new to humanity. It's always been around. Drinking yourself unconscious has always been a thing on sales junkets. Rock star executives have always been doing incredibly inappropriate things. Back in my day, women would choose programming jobs because it was one of the few jobs where there wasn't a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment. I knew lots of women who became programmers because they perceived that the first glass ceiling (getting into management) was totally gone. When I first started hearing that discrimination based on gender was a systemic problem in IT, I couldn't believe it at first -- because it was not in the organisations where I worked at that time.
I honestly believe that this is just an evening out in culture. In my day quite a lot of people entering into university had never used a computer before. Now everybody is computer literate and they carry computers that are vastly more powerful that I started with in their pockets. They grow up playing video games with $100 million budgets and lead programmers/designers that are practically house hold names. When they start out as programmers, they read blog posts from people who have millions of followers and who influence thousands of companies. It's an attractive job for normal people in society. And, unfortunately, society still has a lot of problems to work through.
I'd argue that especially in the culture of HN and startups that the term "professional" only means your ability to interface between people in actual lines of work. A "professional" programmer is more akin to "professional" musician than a "professional" Dentist.
There's an overall lessening of professional employment almost everywhere - at a certain point teachers would always have suits and tie's and parents would have to dress up to go see them the same as they would a Judge or Congressperson. Nowadays the only professionals anyone actually interfaces with are doctors, and maybe lawyers.
(Disclaimer; I'm one of the younger people, I just don't like to party or drink for no reason. I only drink to javascript code.)
Now this is the "get rich quick" job.
People who would have previously entered
into more normal businesses with an aim
to climbing the ladder into executive
positions are looking more and more at
programming as a good entry point.
I remember stories of people moving/retraining from being lawyers & doctors to programmers in the 90s in hopes of getting some of that startup/internet $$$s...
If anything it's less crazy today than it was 20 years ago.
You should see the amount of fraud and craziness in the crypto and blockchain sector.
With leadership that has no experience, what do you really expect?
Buy hey, Zuck and Elon don't have any - and they're the role models de jour, right?
You instead believe in your own exceptionalism, and act accordingly.
I will say reading about all of this makes me even more gung-ho about focusing on this stuff as we grow our current company. There are so many implicit biases even if I'm not a horrible tech-bro. I think we're really good about this stuff but things change and we can always do better.
"Yeah, sure this person did X, but why did people have to react like Y. What a bunch of snowflakes!"
It's extremely toxic, idiotic, and immature. It IS slowly seeping into professional environments. I personally don't abide by it in my teams. You are given creative and professional freedom, this is a privilege and power and with it comes responsibility. If you demonstrate that you are not willing to take this responsibility seriously I have no problem letting you go. We're a good solid company, we pay really well, and we work on cool stuff. Sexism, diet-racism, showing up late to meetings, randomly calling out after half off wine on Wednesdays, isn't tolerable.
I am not old (at least I don't think I am). I haven't hit 30 yet. But I personally feel like the above things seem to be happening in greater and greater frequency and it all comes down to a "freedom-from consequences" attitude.
Americans have a culture (at least a professional one) problem and we don't seem to be willing to discuss it, in my personal view. Maybe it's just constrained to the software development field? Though from what I see from my finance peers I don't believe this to be the case.
I once had to explain why it was unprofessional to spit in someone's food if they didn't tip you in the past.