In other news (apolitical thread)...

[betarhoalphadelta]

Yeah, I think 30+ years ago, people who were willing to put visible tattoos on their body was a social cue as to their perceived "toughness" or signified other personality traits that would make them undesirable for an office sort of environment. Bikers, criminals, rock musicians, etc. Tattoos were a visible signal of nonconformity, and that you DON'T play well with others.

I think it's morphed more into an outward manifestation of free expression, rather than nonconformity, and thus it doesn't carry anywhere near the same stigma. And societal attitudes have adjusted accordingly. 

Now in order to get that level of shock value, it's gotta be a face tattoo. That'll still get you on the "no" list for most professional employment IMHO. 

[medinabuckeye1]

Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make. The game for me was extra hard (and thus extra hard to enjoy) because I was consistently one of the youngest kids on the field.

I think you'll appreciate this story of kinda, the other side of this equation:

My brother's best friend in HS was TINY.  I'm not sure if he weighed triple digits when he graduated from HS.  He was also a State Champion Wrestler.  The advantage he had was that wrestling, of course, is by weight class and at ~100# he was pretty much always wrestling against freshmen.  They were the same size but he had three years of experience and development on them so he was a VERY successful wrestler.  

[betarhoalphadelta]

I think you'll appreciate this story of kinda, the other side of this equation:

My brother's best friend in HS was TINY.  I'm not sure if he weighed triple digits when he graduated from HS.  He was also a State Champion Wrestler.  The advantage he had was that wrestling, of course, is by weight class and at ~100# he was pretty much always wrestling against freshmen.  They were the same size but he had three years of experience and development on them so he was a VERY successful wrestler. 

Yep. I wrestled one year, in 7th grade. I was in the 135# weight class--and at the very top of it--as a 7th grader 

[Gigem]

Agree with this.  Even at a fairly conservative tech company like the one I work for, it's definitely trending more in this direction.  There will come a point in the next decade when the "young people with visible tattoos" will become the "old people working in upper management" and then I don't think there will be any stigma at all, about it.

Several of my younger bosses are covered up in tats.  It's totally normal now.  

Buc-Ees is famous for not hiring anybody with visible tats.  

[utee94]

Several of my younger bosses are covered up in tats.  It's totally normal now. 

Buc-Ees is famous for not hiring anybody with visible tats. 

Not yet normal at my office, but I have no doubt it will be in the next 7-10 years.

[betarhoalphadelta]

Not yet normal at my office, but I have no doubt it will be in the next 7-10 years.

Don't know how youthful your team is... I thought it was funny that when we had our department Christmas lunch a couple of months back, one of the topics of conversation between a couple guys was that they'd hit the "50%" club... They'd been at our company for over 50% of their life. I'm at about 17 1/2 years now, but wouldn't join that club unless I stick around until I'm 58. 

Trying to attract the young'uns to boring data storage when they all want to work for OpenAI or Tesla or SpaceX or [insert hot hip company name] is a little difficult. I don't know if the PC / compute space is similar...

[utee94]

Don't know how youthful your team is... I thought it was funny that when we had our department Christmas lunch a couple of months back, one of the topics of conversation between a couple guys was that they'd hit the "50%" club... They'd been at our company for over 50% of their life. I'm at about 17 1/2 years now, but wouldn't join that club unless I stick around until I'm 58.

Trying to attract the young'uns to boring data storage when they all want to work for OpenAI or Tesla or SpaceX or [insert hot hip company name] is a little difficult. I don't know if the PC / compute space is similar...

I don't know how we do in engineering, but to be honest, we don't do a whole lot of our own engineering anyway.  Test engineering is the majority of it, and that's not overly sexy no matter where you are (I did test engineering for my first 7 years out of undergrad, it is known).

We do get a lot of young MBAs though, especially in my division which is primarily marketing focused.  MBAs like money and don't necessarily care about hot new tech.  Heck a huge number of MBAs go into the boring stiff-ass financial sector. 

Anyway, point being, in my particular group we have a lot of long-tenured veterans like me.  But in my overall division, there are a lot of youngsters.  And since they're mostly MBAs or top-school-business undergrads, they're not overly tatted up, because they still live in a world where old folks who hate tattoos and make all decisions regarding pay and promotions, are going to remain their directors and VPs, for another decade or so.

[Gigem]

Don't know how youthful your team is... I thought it was funny that when we had our department Christmas lunch a couple of months back, one of the topics of conversation between a couple guys was that they'd hit the "50%" club... They'd been at our company for over 50% of their life. I'm at about 17 1/2 years now, but wouldn't join that club unless I stick around until I'm 58.

Trying to attract the young'uns to boring data storage when they all want to work for OpenAI or Tesla or SpaceX or [insert hot hip company name] is a little difficult. I don't know if the PC / compute space is similar...

Well, I work with several different departments, so we’re talking about dozens of people. And not many have tats that are visible, but a few do. It’s kinda strange too because a lot of them had almost no tats until a few years ago and once they broke the seal next thing you know they’re sleeved up. 

[Gigem]

I meant to add a lot of the older ones (40’s and 50’s) are the ones sporting tats. 

[FearlessF]

Several of my younger bosses are covered up in tats.  It's totally normal now. 

Buc-Ees is famous for not hiring anybody with visible tats. 

Bucees
what about chik-fil-a?

[MikeDeTiger]

Look at you pulling out the Million Dollar Words, making me go to dictionary.com. 

Somewhere else that I just recently read, he pulled out another $100 word, the kind that you mostly only know if you went to Purdue.  

Actually I knew it, but I never think of it, and thus never use it.  

Can't remember it, though, and I can't find it.  I think it might have been in the backlog of 25+ pages I was catching up on yesterday in the retirement thread.  

Pity, I have a list of big words that nobody needs, but which I like to whip out on people if they get on my nerves.  Using big words really gets on people's nerves, I don't know why.  See:  Milchick's performance review, Severance, season 2.  

[SFBadger96]

I feel like the mid-90s were the moment tattoos went mainstream, but they were still mostly hideable. I feel like always visible tatoos are a relatively new thing (although I'm getting old, so "relatively new" probably isn't very new). A decent number of people in my staid law office have tattoos--not many are in visible locations during the work day (although the post-Covid change to dress code has impacted that, particularly as it relates to forearms). 

It does seem to be something that snowballs into more for a lot of poeple.

[utee94]

I feel like the mid-90s were the moment tattoos went mainstream, but they were still mostly hideable. I feel like always visible tatoos are a relatively new thing (although I'm getting old, so "relatively new" probably isn't very new). A decent number of people in my staid law office have tattoos--not many are in visible locations during the work day (although the post-Covid change to dress code has impacted that, particularly as it relates to forearms).

It does seem to be something that snowballs into more for a lot of poeple.

Yeah I'm not sure I agree with that.  Mid-90s is exactly when I finished college and went into the workforce, and at that point, almost none of my contemporaries had any kind of tattoo.  Many of them still do not, and most likely never will-- including me.

To be "mainstream" I'd have to believe that a large number of non-fringe people-- including professionals-- were getting tattoos at that time.  And I'm just not sure that's true.  From my observation, at that point it still seemed to be reserved for the rockers, artists, slackers, and other various non-conformists.  MAYBE some tramp-stamps for the party girls who weren't in non-conformist groups, but for the most part they also weren't ending up populating the professional ranks either.

I honestly don't think it was "mainstream" with GenX until more recently.  I do know a handful of GenXers that have gotten some in the last 5-10 years, and some of them even in visible places under normal circumstances.

Millennials on the other hand, definitely took tattoos mainstream early on in their youth/school/professional lives.

[SFBadger96]

That's fair. My thought is that among our contemporaries, as young adults, tattoos became much more common. Probably not among people in their 40s, but among people who were going into the "professional" work force in their future. Now a fair number of middle aged professionals have tattoos--many of which they first got when they were young adults.