Yes, tech workers often are just pieces of office furniture these days, and so getting to be cool rustic armoir is better than being a lame ottoman.
This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment.
Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk.
Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11
I can't quite tell if you're mocking InclinedPlane's comment or the mentality it points out.
Sad though it is, there is a lot of cargo culting around startup office management in SF these days - and presumably elsewhere too. I doubt people really think deep down that having the cliche startup office - tightly packed open plan desks, plenty of microbrews in the fridge, a few bottles of expensive whisky, a wall of snacks, a hoverboard or two - will make or break the success of their compamy. But no one wants to be the first to try not doing it and find out.
Much of that cargo culting is driven by idiotic investors who want to be able to pop into the office and gawk at a veritable army of hoodie-clad brogrammers who look like they came from someone shaking a VHS copy of Hackers a little too hard. As sad as it is, founders and start-up executives often choose these knowingly-dysfunctional offices because it's the most rational choice they can make under the constraints that dummy investors are placing on them. If they go to the investor and say, "boy, for 4x the rent and a buildout cost of $500k, we could really get the product teams humming at a fast pace" they'll just be told to hold onto some ass pennies [0]. But if they say they're going to turn the entire office into one large lazy river waterpark ride, where developers get their own inner tube and a waterproof laptop and everyone wears GoPros all day which will live stream their entire workday to their new spinoff business Constagram ... well now the investor is listening.
But I agree that in a huge number of cases, it's just cargo culting for status. It's probably even damaging their ability to recruit workers, but the cargo cult status matters more.
This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment.
Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk.
Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11