@CPound said:
Maybe that's why things are the way they are currently. ... But do any of you remember the recession after 9/11 when tons of developers (including myself) were laid off and were literally starving? It's such an insult dealing with these youngsters, because I remember suffering through those lean days, begging for a job....any job. God help these guys if another recession hits and all of a sudden they're wondering why they aren't employable.
I was doing a lot of hiring in that time period...If that happens, it's not because they lack a suit.
In cases where there is more supply than demand, the cream rise to the top. The kids with 2 years of VB experience who don't know a linked list from link sausage find that their services aren't as easy to offer, and the people with a broad experience and deep technical knowledge get most of the good jobs. In those cases, you really _don't_ want people making hiring decisions based on menswear, because if you can only afford 2 guys instead of 20, you want the two who can do the work of twenty, not the ones who are going to make a good fashion plate.
@CPound said:
I don't know about you, but I don't work at a Google or a Microsoft. It would be nice to have the luxury of liberal-hippy beanbag chairs, fung shway, and whatnot.
I can assure you that people aren't issued beanbag chairs at the door, nor is there a roving feng shui expert who makes the rounds. There are plenty of republicans in residence as well, I should add. Some of them even wear sandals.
@CPound said:
I work at a normal company which needs to make revenue. Otherwise, the employees don't get paid. I think a lot of you have your heads in the clouds...if your company wasn't profitable you yourself wouldn't have a job.
Not sure what you're saying here. I've stated before that this has been my experience over almost 20 years and at a variety of companies, from 5-person to 50,000-person in size, through recessions and bubbles. Clearly a company needs to be profitable (or at least sustainable, there are plenty of start-ups that remain unprofitable for a time, for instance), that's the goal of a company. The fact that the devs wair suits or sandals doesn't seem to have a direct impact on the bottom line as far as I have seen.
Actually, when I think of the costliest mistakes I've seen, it's usually millions of dollars being wasted by the guys wearing the suits up in the executive suite, not the tattooed, bull-ringed and sandal-wearing devs down in the cubes. The company I left last just shut down a new business line after blowing 6 million on an aquisition and hundreds of thousands tying the crappy-ass system into their own... only to discover it was unprofitable. The entire time, I was there in my rebellious khakis waving and saying "hey, maybe we need to invest in the crumbling infrastructure that supports our core business rather than spending millions on this boondoggle". Suits won out, of course, and now the company is laying off 10% of it's workforce, pushing the COO out, etc. Bravo.
-cw