I remember a day at a previous job when our CEO came in and told us we weren't an early stage startup anymore and had to start acting like it. Remove profanity and inside jokes from the code, and no more Quake during lunch breaks. Morale took a big hit that day.

if a CEO did that to me I'd just tell him to pull the stick out of his ass. none of it has anything to do with maturity.

but I'm relatively old.

you can Quake (or Overwatch or whatever the current game is) during lunch breaks at every FAANG, for christ's sake. (it's different if you're playing it during working hours.)

Yeah. Joking around helps build camaraderie, and makes people want to stay working there. I'm not sure who or where these hypothetical pearl clutchers, who can't handle a codebase with jokes or a bit of swearing, are, or why management care so much about them hypothetically encountering the codebase and getting upset. Sanitising everything and making it family friendly just makes workplaces even more soulless, rather than letting us have a bit of character in our work. At best it makes you look humourless, and at worst it can make people feel anxious about causing offence, if it's particularly strict policing

Time to unionize over that crap