After three days at a metal festival (in Pilsen), I realized something sad. In the software world, we don’t have fun at work anymore. I am not talking about the HR-inspired fun; I am talking about the joy that comes from the inside.<p>Do you remember the chair rowing?<p>Do you remember how amazed we were to crash a keyboard or two on each other backs? Do you remember us singing songs about Java while writing fake protocols?<p>What kind of fun did you use to have in your teams before the HR-organized joy of playing volleyball and drinking beer from PHP-shaped mugs? Help me inspire more people with a talk I am building.<p>Thanks!
Not sure I ever worked anywhere that had a formal HR department although now I'm a bit emeritus consultarse for projects that do.<p>I always enjoyed dull mundane stuff, pre dawn musters to launch and run calibration stacks up to 12,000 feet to compute cosmic parameters, jumping in to clear heli sites | landing strips, having to scale peaks to set mag|gps base stations.<p>All the fun and games of geophysical code development.
I remember lan parties in the board room. And the spontaneous pizza party. It was a geeks wonderland. And often it was company sponsored.<p>Never had the crashing of keyboards, because well mechanical keyboards are not cheep.<p>I do remember the "every OS sucks" song.
"Do you remember how amazed we were to crash a keyboard or two on each other backs? Do you remember us singing songs about Java while writing fake protocols?<p>What kind of fun did you use to have in your teams before the HR-organized joy of playing volleyball and drinking beer from PHP-shaped mugs."<p>None of those activities sound fun, but if I had to choose I'd take the HR organized volleyball and beer drinking.