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Comment by rixed | Hacker News Reader

Not only are devs micromanaged by any figure of authority with not much tech knowledge and sometime not even business knowledge and freshly landed from a different industry, if not from school, but devs are also happy to be, quite frankly, considered as mere children.

Other skilled professions do not either communicate with memes, have slides and swings in the office (as seen in some Google offices), etc. If part of the geek culture is being infantile, that's no wonder that devs got told what to do.

I don't know if the gamification of dev work went so far because of this, or if the causality goes the other way around.

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I've said it before that these "copy paste" and "stack overflow" memes reflect badly on us.

People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes.

> People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes.

Maybe, but if any non-developer internalizes a worldview from those memes...that really just means they're blind to the usually worse offenses in other careers. While not perfect, measuring programmer productivity is infinitely easier than a long list of other job roles. At the top of that list is "middle manager".

We take hits on the chin about elitism, sexism, whatever other low-point of human nature. Meanwhile, whoever is spewing the critique fails to notice that in practically any other role, the *-isms are worse and harder to prove.

Forgot to mention the most obvious childhood markers of all: toys and treats! Again, I'm looking at you Google, which offices are (were?) loaded with nerf guns, stuffed animals and treats... at least, in the engineering buildings.

To some degree I believe management do this on purpose.

I've always worked in small companies and been responsible for getting the work done, as a solo developer in a lot of cases here was nobody to blame if things went wrong. In a larger company now but it's still a smaller place, have the same attitude to work even now.

Maybe it's this environment has made me a more serious person than some of the other developers I know. Don't use memes in conversations with collegues and certainly have no interest in toys and games in the office.

Would love to not be responsible and not treat work as a fun place but don't see how that's possible if you care about your job and the work that you produce.

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