> These are almost exclusively for kids in school or just out of school.
They are not. One of the places I've worked, they were part of the culture, once or twice a year. Reports suggest this is true many other places, as well. These are real, professional, grown-up workplaces, or so at least they style themselves as being. They are not schools.
> If you hate them, don't do them, they aren't necessary.
They can be. I had no desire whatsoever to waste a weekend working without pay in exchange for pizza. It was made clear to me that, while my participation would not be explicitly required as a condition of employment, it certainly would constitute a substantive part of my next performance evaluation. The subtext was: everybody else is doing it, so if you don't, you're clearly not committed enough to work here. Again, reports suggest this is far from unique to the organization I describe.
> The engineer bro-culture and a certain social status that is assigned to software or computer engineers and geekdom in general is a new [phenomenon].
Honestly, this is 110% a startup culture thing, just like the kegerator and the "hackathon" example of Mandatory Fun. I've never seen it anywhere else. No idea why it is the way it is, but not gonna lie, if I'd known 25 years ago that the field around which I intended to build my working life was going to go the way it has in terms of culture, I'd have had to sit down and study a while on whether I shouldn't change my plans somewhat.
The good news is that it is just startup culture that's gone this way. For all the contempt that culture likes to aim at the "enterprise" world, and for all that enterprise engineering culture does tend to lack somewhat by comparison, it is a world in which the need for work-life balance is generally well respected.
It also, perhaps to the surprise of some, tends much more diverse than startups do, which may suggest that the monoculture problem isn't so much one of tech in general, but rather perhaps of a piece with the drawbacks of startup culture specifically - that perhaps a desire for "culture fit", so called, has even more negative dimensions than are generally acknowledged. After all, when your hiring process explicitly considers whether a candidate is enough like everyone already there to satisfy some nebulous standard of personal comfort...
They are not. One of the places I've worked, they were part of the culture, once or twice a year. Reports suggest this is true many other places, as well. These are real, professional, grown-up workplaces, or so at least they style themselves as being. They are not schools.
> If you hate them, don't do them, they aren't necessary.
They can be. I had no desire whatsoever to waste a weekend working without pay in exchange for pizza. It was made clear to me that, while my participation would not be explicitly required as a condition of employment, it certainly would constitute a substantive part of my next performance evaluation. The subtext was: everybody else is doing it, so if you don't, you're clearly not committed enough to work here. Again, reports suggest this is far from unique to the organization I describe.
> The engineer bro-culture and a certain social status that is assigned to software or computer engineers and geekdom in general is a new [phenomenon].
Honestly, this is 110% a startup culture thing, just like the kegerator and the "hackathon" example of Mandatory Fun. I've never seen it anywhere else. No idea why it is the way it is, but not gonna lie, if I'd known 25 years ago that the field around which I intended to build my working life was going to go the way it has in terms of culture, I'd have had to sit down and study a while on whether I shouldn't change my plans somewhat.
The good news is that it is just startup culture that's gone this way. For all the contempt that culture likes to aim at the "enterprise" world, and for all that enterprise engineering culture does tend to lack somewhat by comparison, it is a world in which the need for work-life balance is generally well respected.
It also, perhaps to the surprise of some, tends much more diverse than startups do, which may suggest that the monoculture problem isn't so much one of tech in general, but rather perhaps of a piece with the drawbacks of startup culture specifically - that perhaps a desire for "culture fit", so called, has even more negative dimensions than are generally acknowledged. After all, when your hiring process explicitly considers whether a candidate is enough like everyone already there to satisfy some nebulous standard of personal comfort...