Personal-professional relationships are stronger than professional images, especially as it becomes less and less possible to get a job without a well-placed reference from a friend who is willing to go to bat for you. Although companies in the tech industry make more effort to have "meritocratic" (in fact random, there's nothing meritocratic about trying to guess someone's project management ability using eight hours of talking to people they've never met before, spread out over days) I see this being eroded over time as everyone pulls together in our low-interest-rate where's-the-recession, it's-coming-any-day-now environment. Although hiring managers might disagree on whose friends among them should be hired, they will all silently agree that the hiring system needs to only hire friends of somebody. That's what drives the evolution of corporate process in an inexorable slide towards the equilibrium most industries have already reached, one where consultants are brought in to cover the holes left by bringing in old friends.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.
I do think there's a bright line, but it's between trying to express yourself while negotiating reasonable emotional common ground (personal) and constantly trying to prove yourself while expanding your "turf" of opinions and beliefs as far as possible (professional), which is then confused in context when people operate in one mode in an environment that really fits the other. The complementary mode swap to the one you are talking about, are the crowd who argue non-stop in the Twitter replies of people who were just having a thought and not actually planning to become a Socratic philosopher. That is the consequence of treating every interaction like it's a task-focused meeting with implied rewards for whoever comes out looking like they were on the top of it.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.