I think this is more of the issue. Young startups and management are much more lax with this type of thing and let it fester and become a bigger issue than it ever should have been. I’ve worked at fortune 10 companies and smaller startups founded by older folks and there has never been any overt sexual innuendo or politics talk which would be obviously divisive. Most everyone has enough emotional intelligence to know these things should be left at home since there’s no reason to bring them up at work.
Once I was hired at a company founded and run by boomers, and on the first day noticed several stacks of magazines like "Hustler" etc. just sitting on the floor in a manager's office, while we conversed with other colleagues some of whom were women. This was probably 15 years ago, and I didn't quit or anything, but let's not exaggerate the virtues of old people.
If anything this C-suite freakout seems like a result of too much Covid isolation. Lots of executives are hyper-extroverts who need lots of coddling from people they've hired for that task. Some needs just aren't fulfilled over Zoom. This last year set these super entrepreneur dudes [and, to be fair, their top-percentile coding-god employees too] on tilt, and they're lashing out trying to get back on track. It's their company; if they want to sacrifice some jobs and profits on the altar of their warped personalities how can we blame them?
I'm not arguing either way, but both are extremes in decorum. Most companies run by generic middle of the road boring folks adhere to general decorum overall vs explicitly offensive behavior. This isn't because they're more virtuous IMO from my experience, just because they like most folks want to work 9-5, collect a paycheck and go home and not rock the boat.
> This was probably 15 years ago, and I didn't quit or anything, but let's not exaggerate the virtues of old people.
That’s true, but every time we humans have tried “let’s throw everything out and start over” it’s ended in tears. And that’s the prevailing vibe I get right now.
We're not talking about the French Revolution here. This is a small-to-medium (or, recently, perhaps "medium-to-small") privately-held SaaS firm. For its entire existence, this firm's marketing has taken the form of checks written against a hypothetical account of expertise in business organization and cultural transformation. This week most of those checks have bounced, but that is because of the particular properties of this organization, not "kids these days".
That you can find an exception from the bad old days, where a company was run like a <80s mechanic shop, doesn't negate that experience dealing with people is useful.
