Comment by ditonal

You know, I'm all about being laid back and rejecting traditional corporate culture, because you can be serious without a suit. But you still need the "be serious" part, which somehow got lost between all the ping pong tables and beer on tap. I actually think a big chunk of the industry encourages unprofessionalism, because professionals do really obnoxious things like negotiate compensation. I really hope that the tech scene can hold on to the fun parts of what makes it special, while getting rid of terrible things like this. But, in my opinion, culture and professionalism starts at the top, even if it's easy to go after the low-status, low-political-power programmers at the bottom. The typical company will give you sexual harassment training and fire people who do inappropriate things, but the same companies encourage their 20-somethings to get wasted at Friday happy hours and have few to no women on their board of directors or executive management positions, and that culture of men-in-charge inevitably trickles down.