Feeling like very much the old guy leaving a comment here, but I've been shocked about behaviour of young employees before. When I was 40, I move to Japan and taught English. This is after a good 20 years of working professionally as a programmer. They sent a bunch of us English teachers to a conference (at considerable expense to the tax payer). The night before the conference a bunch of the younger people decided it was a good time for a party and ended up drinking until the wee hours. The next day, the supervisor was yelling at a group of them. Apparently they had decided to "call in sick". Their main argument was that if they didn't feel up to going to work, then it was their right to take the day off. You can imagine that this didn't go over well with the supervisor :-)

I remember thinking that I'd never seen anything like this kind of behaviour when I was young and first starting out -- well never mind that the startups I worked at would never send new grads to a conference. That was a privilege (and responsibility) for someone with more experience. But I remember thinking that nobody would do that.

Since I've returned to working as a programmer, I've noticed this kind of thing rearing its ugly head more and more. The idea of being a "professional" has changed quite a bit. For one thing, there is a lot more money in the profession and this has attracted a very different set of people to the industry. Back when I first started out, if you said you were a computer programmer, people kind of looked at you in pity. Now this is the "get rich quick" job. People who would have previously entered into more normal businesses with an aim to climbing the ladder into executive positions are looking more and more at programming as a good entry point.

Not only that, but the rise of the internet has also given rise to the programmer rock star. So not only money, but also fame is on the line. I think especially at a well known game studio, people are lining up not for money, but for status. This attracts a completely different sort of person than "Come join our startup that's writing new accounting software for airlines". I think that rock star attitude brings with it the rock star behaviour.

The thing is, I don't think this attitude is new to humanity. It's always been around. Drinking yourself unconscious has always been a thing on sales junkets. Rock star executives have always been doing incredibly inappropriate things. Back in my day, women would choose programming jobs because it was one of the few jobs where there wasn't a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment. I knew lots of women who became programmers because they perceived that the first glass ceiling (getting into management) was totally gone. When I first started hearing that discrimination based on gender was a systemic problem in IT, I couldn't believe it at first -- because it was not in the organisations where I worked at that time.

I honestly believe that this is just an evening out in culture. In my day quite a lot of people entering into university had never used a computer before. Now everybody is computer literate and they carry computers that are vastly more powerful that I started with in their pockets. They grow up playing video games with $100 million budgets and lead programmers/designers that are practically house hold names. When they start out as programmers, they read blog posts from people who have millions of followers and who influence thousands of companies. It's an attractive job for normal people in society. And, unfortunately, society still has a lot of problems to work through.