Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners 400
waderoush writes "Plenty of technology companies serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to their employees, but Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy says that's a form of mind control designed to get people to to work late. To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner. Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers). Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit. And don't hire assholes. Why pay attention to Duffy's advice? Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left."
Hm. (Score:4, Insightful)
But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work.
If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
Re:Hm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no.
Sometimes you need to get off your ass and walk around once in awhile. Focus your eyes on something that doesn't involve pixels or a desk. Lunchtime is perfect for that. Gives you a chance to get out, walk around, notice things, talk to folks in a groups, and in a setting where you're not all eyeballing a PowerPoint presentation.
I get the leave-earlier paradigm, but honestly? 8-10 straight hours in front a screen makes Johnny a very unhappy soul. Break that shit up.
Re:Hm. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hm. (Score:5, Informative)
Normal people do, yes.
A lot of tech workers don't act like normal people, however.
Re:Hm. (Score:4, Insightful)
You can provide lunch and this as well. Many companies you see people packing their lunch and eating at the desk in order to get lunch over quickly so they can leave early. If you provide lunch in other area but insist they don't bring their lunch to their desk, it would be a positive.
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You can provide lunch and this as well. Many companies you see people packing their lunch and eating at the desk in order to get lunch over quickly so they can leave early. If you provide lunch in other area but insist they don't bring their lunch to their desk, it would be a positive.
Yes, being micromanaged by control freaks who want to tell me how and where I may eat is so exquisitely positive and definitely boosts morale.
Here's a better idea: if the employee is productive and does good work, find something that actually IS broken and fix that instead.
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Coming late to this, but drinks are one thing. Food at the desk is messy, and potentially smelly. I don't want to sit next to someone having a microwave curry, or some fish abomination, and stinking the office out. Not allowing you to eat at your desk isn't micromanaging you - it's putting a rule in place to stop inconsiderate bastards pissing off their colleagues (and sometimes nauseating them). Rather than say "no smelly food" and leave it open to argument and accusations, it's easier and fairer to just
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You guys seem to be missing another big reason to bring a lunch to work and eat it there: money. Eating out at a local restaurant is expensive, whereas I can bring a lunch in, and only pay $1-5, depending on the ingredients or it it's a microwave meal. You're not going to get a good meal at a local restaurant for that. And the quality will probably be bad too.
Re:Hm. (Score:4, Insightful)
I enjoy my lunch hour.
Pfft (Score:5, Funny)
To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner.
That's fine for regular employees, but assuming sys admins want to go home to their families is just silly.
http://xkcd.com/705/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Being the kind of sysadmin that behaves like that, I can assure you I'd prefer to work in a team with other like-minded types, so I know that I can go home, and we'll still be online.
24 hour coverage is much easier to do with 4 or 5 rotating watches than 1 guy on call.
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A team of 4-5 sys admins? Do you guys all have the passwords? Someone should tell San Francisco.
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You really need to look into something like this [cyber-ark.com].
Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:4, Insightful)
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
I think you're confusing jerk-off with asshole. A jerk-off is what you're describing in the first sentence, and also the environment that eventually turns other people into assholes.
A true asshole does quality work, but quickly becomes annoyed when:
- people check in "shit" code that fixes the symptom without addressing the actual problem
- they have to adhere to shit specs they had no input on
- they have to work with jerk-offs (as defined above)
"Know your shit" OR "Know you're shit"
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have people been calling you an asshole for so long that you feel the need to redefine the word asshole into something good? "Asshole" most certainly does not imply or even in the slightest connote competence.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty much the textbook definition of a good programmer, not a mediocre one.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:4, Insightful)
A good programmer, but not a good developer. Non-mediocre developers are good enough at software architecture to contribute to the spec, not just follow it.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty much the textbook definition of a good programmer, not a mediocre one.
Ah, but the definition among many young-uns is all night marathon coding living off soda and cheetos with the occasional coffee/smoke break, and producing something that is lean, mean and impresses other programmers with cryptic lines that no one else understands. After all, who looks at code they wrote the previous semester? Whitespaces and comments are for n00bs - the code is the documentation.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
If they could do that (esp. the bold part), they wouldn't be mediocre developers.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the bold part is the bar for being an average developer. Not to be harsh, but if you can't right good code to spec then you suck, and should do something else for a living.
A good developer finds the simplicity hidden in each complex problem. He creates the design that makes people say "wow, it really is that simple" not "hmmm, how does that actually solve the problem here".
Re: (Score:2)
Salesmen.
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it. (Score:4)
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other.
Assholes create and cause shit. Noted.
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Assholes is a very subjective term. I know plenty of guys who are frequently labelled "assholes" who write brilliantly clear, extensible code to deadline, mentor others and drive groups of people forward as a team. They are labelled assholes by the people who don't complete tasks, push both work and blame onto others and shirk responsibility. Brilliant and hard working people have very high standards and very rarely afford civility to those who willingly fall short and thus are perceived as assholes by them
They're overanalyzing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some programmers like free dinners, and enjoy sleeping til noon and working til midnight, and don't mind the 12 hours because their best friends are at work.
Other programmers want to work 9-5 to drop kids off in the morning and get home to them at dinner.
Many programmers go through each of those stages in their carreers.
It's not an either/or question. Just make a workplace that accomodates both groups and keeps both happy.
Re:They're overanalyzing. (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, the art of management in IT is often perceived as being maximizing the amount of hours worked (in the demonstrably mistaken belief that this means these programmers are getting more done), so companies try to ensure they get more programmers in the first group and no programmers in the second group.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Managers and MBA's think that (maximising hours) == (maximising output), knowing nothing about how productivity tails off when hours worked in a week exceed ~ 40 or so.
I fixed it for you. The above is true of 99.9% of the companies I have worked for.
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"Dumb people think that (maximising hours) == (maximising output),"
The post clearly stated that this is the philosophy of "IT management".
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...this is the philosophy of bad "IT management".
FTFY.
Re:They're overanalyzing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Productivity in areas that require actual thought and concentration falls off after about 20 hours. Even 40 hours is a joke for anything but menial physical labor.
What this means is that the best ways to increase worker productivity are:
If you do these things, your productivity will soar.
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I'll take BE a contractor...
Come in, do work, have incredibly HIGH bill rate, don't have to fsck with office politics, get paid for EVERY hour you work, rarely get asked to work OT, and write off many more things on taxes than the W2 employees.
Also..dictate your own vacation hours (included in your bill rate).
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Maybe it's easier to accomodate to a uniform group. Although it's worth pointing out that this approach may not work outside the US, hiring based on age, sex and family status isn't exactly legal everywhere.
His Employees Already Win... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe good advice, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
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Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
I've worked for several startups. Four years is long enough to expect some turnover if the headcount is non-trivial. The pointed questions to ask are:
1) How many employees?
2) What kind of roles to they serve?
3) Is the company obscuring turnover by keeping traditionally high-turnover roles like sales as contractor?
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After seeing how several of the big boys run things, there's only really a few that actually have any better handle on it than those that've only been around for 5 years or less.
How many businesses fail in the first year? Most of them. Honestly, some of that "sound" advice you're hinting at did well for Motorola, TI, and a few others- not.
If you look at some of the other companies still doing well in these times, they're doing similar things. First rule of thumb: Put your employees FIRST. They will put
And here is where I stopped reading (Score:5, Interesting)
That’s why there are no free dinners at Dropcam—around 6:00 pm the company
I am sorry, at WHAT time? Ever heard the song 9 to 5? 9 to 5! Dinner is at 6 o'clock. Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8. Kids will be in bed by that time. Dinner will be waiting in the oven.
A GOOD going home hour is 5... oh wait. that is rush hour, means you leave "early" and arrive home just as late. Do you know what would be even BETTER? A company with FLEXIBLE hours and a max 8 hours on the workfloor. Now THAT would be a social company. Even better if you can take a half day off to deal with plumbers and other stuff.
Nobody left in the last 4 years. Geez, I wonder why. An economy down the drain may have something to do with it.
Don't get me wrong, a company that doesn't expect unpaid overtime in exchange for a greasy cold pizza (especially if there is no pizza) everyday gets pretty old pretty fast. But closing the doors at 6 doesn't show much of an improvement. You are still putting in a long day, except now you don't get free dinner at the end of the day. What about those without a family for who a company dinner saves time not having to cook for themselves?
It is telling that the article calls him a wunderkind idealist and then fails to list any idealistic thing in the next few paragraphs.
Re:And here is where I stopped reading (Score:5, Insightful)
Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8.
A two hour commute one way? If you're spending four hours a day commuting you're living in the wrong place.
Steve Jobs? (Score:2)
Apple would never exist
Food rewards (Score:5, Insightful)
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
Let me guess which group represents the largest of (Score:2)
> Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers).
Let me guess which group represents the largest of new programmers out there?
Wha the actual fuck? (Score:2)
Brogramming -- a direct result of Dunning Kruger (Score:3, Interesting)
Retention. (Score:2)
Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left.
Not a surprise in this crap economy. How many have been fired? In the '80s I worked for a very small company with an extended 100% retention rate; nothing lasts forever.
Otherwise, I generally agree with the sentiment. As for "brogrammers," there's no evidence that young, single, childless males are better than other combinations and I'd argue that herd ("gaggle" -- "braggle"?) of them is a recipe for disaster. Varied experience and perspective are more helpful in the long run.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:2)
I'm not sure the words "beef" and "dinner" were the best choice to use in the headline... :p
Shut up and take my money (Score:4, Interesting)
An honest to god company that
a) doesn't trying to abuse it's workers,
b) hires normal people who are decent workers but also have lives outside the office
I don't need a camera. I just want to send them money.
employee retention (Score:3)
no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left...
... alive.
Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:5, Informative)
"...that we shouldn't want things like identities, families, and lives. It is a joy for us to be interchangeable work-bots. Dissention must be expunged so that we can be assimilated. Obedience is happiness!"
"Agile" does nothing of the sort. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
Re: But...Agile teaches us... (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it a crucial part of Agile to tell others they are doing Agile wrong? :)
Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:5, Insightful)
The one consistent thing about Agile: "you're doing it wrong". I have never seen a different answer to any complaint about Agile.
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That's one possibility. Another is that whatever is supposed to be The One True Agile (tm) requires certain pre-conditions that aren't always met.
I could say "don't blame the single-pass waterfall process - if it failed for you, then you're doing it wrong". In some (rare) cases, single-pass waterfall is exactly right - a single programmer implementing a rigid specification (for example writing an H.264 decoder). But that's a pre-condition. It won't always fail and it won't always work, just like "Agile" or
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. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
At this point Agile has assume mythical qualities. Any time anything fails to work as promised by Agile, the implementation gets the blame, not Agile. They keep parroting the same thing. "if it does not work, you are doing agile wrong". You could postulate an imaginary waterfall organization, staffed with mythical programmers who do waterfall right. Then I could also say, "if it does not work, you are not doing waterfall right".
We have agile. We have agile tools. We have vendors selling agile management
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Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
This is a pretty good little tangential comment thread. IANAPC (professional coder), but I'm quite familiar with professional methods with capitalized names that use the no true Scotsman fallacy to claim that every unsuccessful project was simply one that didn't correctly follow the method's instructions. On the other hand, any successful project was necessarily successful because of the Capitalized Method and the only way to quantify the value added by this method is to claim that the profit generated by the entire project is 100% due to the method's efficacy, of course.
Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
But that's what agile really is. If you're really doing iterative development (getting to shippable every so often, not merely calling N weeks of coding "an iteration") then you're doing Agile.
Don't confuse "Agile" with products cooked up by Agile consulting companies in order to have something to sell, like scrum and eXtremeProgramming.
Agile is 4 ideas:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan
There's a bunch of buzzwordism and scams and generally bad news sold as Agile, and all the BS has (perhaps rightfully) given Agile a bad name, but those 4 ideas are good ones.
Re:But...Agile teaches us... (Score:4, Insightful)
Agile is 4 ideas ...
Congratulations, you've passed the Rorschach test! For bonus points, tell us what the "cloud" really is.
BTW, I not only like your ideas, I've followed them as much as possible since long before "Agile" was a buzzword. But while decrying buzzwordism, you've overlooked that "Agile" (capitalized? seriously?) is itself just a buzzword.
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Agile has been around for quite some time now - certainly before the inanity of extreme programming and long before scrum. But giving something a buzzwordy name helps sell it to management. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are without management buy-In.
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None of which have anything to do with a majority of agile I've seen
*Individuals.. blah blah blah
Yeah, I can't even tell you what this means. I doubt anyone else can either. Its marketing drivel that sounds moderately impressive, but has no real effect on how any company does anything.
*working software over documentation
Even when doing agile the absolute most effective companies I've seen have lots of documentation. Those that didn't either had 1 or 2 amazing developers who were the documentation (have a
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I have to agree. The one thing I unconditionally disagree with Agile on is their attitude towards documentation. I agree that this may speed the process of coding... maybe... but it makes long term support a disaster. Code is not documentation, even well formatted and comment
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*Software is written by people...
Umm, no duh? Once again, is there anything that means anything in that sentence? At absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology- if it wasn't bad it wouldn't be too much.
*If you spend 6 months...
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code. On the other hand most agile projects fall way to hard on the other side- absolutely no documentation. Architecture doesn't appear- at least not good, clean, usable archi
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Based on what I've seen and the places I've worked over the years, all of that is nowhere near as easy as it sounds.
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Duffy is a genius, so you'd expect him to show common sense
I don't think the link between genius and common sense is as strong as you seem to think it is.
Though I may only be saying that because I definitely don't have any of one of those.
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Just Like... (Score:2)
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left"
Just like the CIA.
Re:100 percent of 1 is 1 (Score:4, Informative)
how many employees are there? just him?
FTA:
Rather, it's that people just like to stay: Dropcam has hired 30 workers to date, and it's never had to give a single going-away party.
Re:100 percent of 1 is 1 (Score:4, Interesting)
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
Re:100 percent of 1 is 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Re:100 percent of 1 is 1 (Score:5, Funny)
Depending on the quantity of VC available, it could be profitable to rent ~20 cars and park them in your lot overnight.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Score:5, Insightful)
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
Re:100 percent of 1 is 1 (Score:4, Interesting)
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
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he was probably just ego-wanking all over you to make you realise what an important big man he was.
only big, already successful companies can afford to own or rent their own parking lots. startups rent office space and most of their employees rely on street parking or nearby commercial parking (or public transport, bicycles, or living within
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everyone they canned they freaking hated.
Re:100 percent of 30 is 30 (Score:3)
30.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some creative, innovative youngsters grow up to become creative, innovative parents with children.
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Meltdown. That's what happens...
Re:Slashdot = intellectual vomit (Score:4, Insightful)
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
Re:Slashdot = intellectual vomit (Score:5, Funny)
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A 'brogrammer' is a specific subset of young male programmers generally. Anybody using it as a synonym for 'young, probably unmarried, male programmer' is doing it wrong; but there is a recognizable population(unfortunately) that it fits pretty well.
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Some of us are young, single, and childless (not necessarily male). It's a neat perk that keeps the cost of living down, and in the Bay Area those costs are already ludicrously expensive.
Besides, who wants to take advice from a four year old no name company just barely out of its diapers? Come back when you've been around at least a decade.
There's plenty of cheap (and good) food in the bay area - if you can afford the cost of Bay Area housing, dinners needn't be a major expense. I can pick up a decent meal (Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, etc) for $6 - $8 within a 10 minute walk from home or from the office. Though I usually end up cooking.
Re:Reactionary much? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of place that don't suck. I hope you work in one. There are plenty of places where no one needs to work more than 40 hours to meet commitments, and only the overachievers do.
There are plenty of places where the norm is for a coder to have his or her daily schedule dominated by whether he or she "picks up" or "drops off" the kids, not by meetings. There are plenty of places where keeping your skills current isn't some after-hours effort. Strangely enough, programming doesn't require heroic effort to ship on time if your basic engineering processes are smart to begin with - something that requires experience with many ways of doing things to get right.
A mature workforce is part of all of that. Look at any other engineering discipline, and you'll see careers from the early 20s to the early 60s, and a real career path for the second twenty years of engineering work. Software engineering is still maturing as a field, but we'll get there.
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I've never heard brogrammer used in this context without a negative connotation. EVERY time I've heard it used prior is in the context of sexist, discriminating work environments that tend to reinforce homogeneous work forces. I hope that term doesn't generically start referring to single, male programmers.
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Who's the idiot who came up with "brogrammers"?
The sexist leaders of our oppressively matriarchal society. Ha ha, just kidding. It was probably some guy wearing a "Titty Inspector" t-shirt and backwards baseball cap.
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Also, random CEO of random start-up expresses own misguided opinion, everyone better take a knee and listen up.
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Whats his position on Foosball ? No Foosball, no work, seriously.
1999 called, they want their overused dotcom-era fads back. (*) Seriously, at this point, a foosball table is probably a negative sign, the cliched, almost obligatory easy-choice symbol a company would choose if they wanted to make themselves appear a (superficially) fun and exciting place to gullible young programmers.
:-P
(*) Then again, the 1990s probably want their "[year] called, they want their [subject] back" cliche back, but they're not getting it
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Did you warn them? You didn't?!
http://xkcd.com/875/ [xkcd.com]
Re:hey jerkface (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how you managed to read all that from that one sentence.
I read it as, "We don't want a bunch of inexperienced kids who don't necessarily know how to code, and don't understand anything about what real life is like."
I think this is a great sentiment, especially considering that in silicon valley is undergoing an epidemic of age-ism.
He didn't say anything about discriminating against anyone who doesn't fit some hetero-normative world view. He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty.
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-Male: Sadly, sexism in the industry is pretty well established. No good reason for it. There ARE reasons, but none of them good.
Sexism is common in workplaces stuffed with mostly young male workers (or mostly young female workers). Hiring a more representative crowd tends to put a damper on "bro culture".
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My understanding of federal anti-discrimination laws, is that this is illegal.
Brogrammers are quick to cite federal anti-discrimination laws. Thank heavens no company in SV would engage in say age discrimination.
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My understanding is that familial status is only a protected class for housing discrimination. At least federally.