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What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one - basically it's a posh person finding out what the "real world" looks li

What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one - basically it's a posh person finding out what the "real world" looks like. Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.

scotty79 2y ago
> Any difference is going to be a target. Those are primary school rules. Seeing adults living like that is shocking.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  Primary schoolers are the sweetest people in the world. It is middle schoolers that express adult emotions with no filter. Fortunately the filter does get more effective with practice, but it is always worth remembering that at their core, most people are not fundamentally different than they were in middle school.
- verisimi 2y ago
  Seeing adults pretending not to notice differences is also shocking, funny too.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    I'm sure they see the differences, just decide to evaluate them as irrelevant. Which is their right as adults.
Rendello 2y ago
It was interesting for me going from interacting with wealthy, educated developers, to working in a very physical, low-paying blue-collar job. It seemed like living in two different worlds almost. > working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics I'm curious to what you mean by this
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence. I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc. Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    > find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.
    - naming_the_user 2y ago
      Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).
- graemep 2y ago
  Do the women have to be the "care taker" and the men the "provider"? The proportion of jobs in developed economies that require physical strength is much lower than it used to be. As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer. I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    Not everyone has to be - I do about half the childcare of my daughter and am often the odd-man-out at child activities. But most people have to be because that's what each sex wants. It's not a great plan to be looking for a partner by not having a job and telling everyone that your goal is to be a stay-at-home dad who wants a high-earning wife to support him. Women aren't interested in that.
    - graemep 2y ago
      That is true but it is exactly what I think the problem is. Women do want careers as good as those of men. There are huge efforts made to equalise numbers of women in various careers (especially high paying ones and in senior positions). I do not see how this can work without men taking on more traditionally female roles. IMO we should make it more acceptable for men to be stay at home dads, just as we have made it acceptable (and entirely normal) for women to do a lot of traditionally male jobs.
neilv 2y ago
I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that's the only factor in everything the article described, and it's not specific to blue collar work. There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too. Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism. Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects. You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.
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- mydriasis 2y ago
  It's even worse. The educated tech industry workers don't actually make any banter, so any time their prejudices slip through, it's just their actual opinions instead of banter. It's a very bizarre opposite to the supposedly 'uneducated' blue collar way of doing things, which brings levity as a first-class citizen, and communicates boundaries well. You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense. Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules. It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one. People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
mschuster91 2y ago
> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers. At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages. (The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)
- stavros 2y ago
  This is like someone telling a fish that there are people who live on land, and the fish saying "it doesn't have to be that way". Someone mentions a cultural difference between your group and another, and you say "the other group is wrong, my culture is right". Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.
  - skinkestek 2y ago
    Someone with background from from the US military (OK, Ryan McBeth) recently commented something along the lines of: > everyone is picked on. If you don't get picked on that is reason for concern. By quoting this, do I mean to encourage bullying? No, as the kid that wasn't included during my first years of school, NO. But there is a difference between everyone calling each other names vs everyone calling someone names etc.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
esperent 2y ago
> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
- deleted 2y ago
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- yCombLinks 2y ago
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- wyager 2y ago
  If you have this attitude, you aren't cut out to work in the trades
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    The trades need to change then. What you and others are so blithely defending in this thread is textbook toxic behavior.
    - wyager 2y ago
      What exactly is your plan to achieve this "needed" change?
      - lazyasciiart 2y ago
        Ooh, that’s a great shutdown, do you use it when someone brings up male suicide rates too?
      - itsoktocry 2y ago
        Academia and the managerial class are going to lecture blue collar workers from the luxury of their remote offices, same as it ever was.
aaplok 2y ago
Well there is this though: > Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead. There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.
- orwin 2y ago
  I think GP is right though. Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs. But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
    - dmix 2y ago
      He claimed “more prevalent” not “only white collar does x”
      - notahacker 2y ago
        He also claimed the ass-grabs and demeaning remarks will "always" be from managers [without trade experience]. Which is wild.
        orwin 2y ago
        It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that). But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy). I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?
jrflowers 2y ago
I love this post. It not only makes no sense whatsoever, it flattens gender, race, being ginger, and having tattoos into one uniform measure of Otherness in a way that preserves a magical naïveté and childlike wonder that’s absent in virtually every adult
- brownJorts 2y ago
  Crafting grammatically correct sentences doesn’t rewrite immutable physics. https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becoming-more-widely-acceptable-linguistics-experts-c https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becomi... Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us. People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die. Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    What are you trying to say?
mplewis 2y ago
It’s never malicious when you’re the one having fun, huh?
kardianos 2y ago
A lot of the specifics mentioned in the article aren't specific to her being a woman. Many guys just talk about things differently; they will banter about themselves and how any lady is easier on the eyes then any man. That's not sexism; that's just reality of what a guy thinks and banters about. And an average guy is stronger then the average girl; that's biology. Most guys don't care what sex you are, so long as you can do the work, don't complain much, and can afford banter to make the day go by faster.
- Neil44 2y ago
  I thought similar. Anyone moving from an office environment to one of physical work is going to struggle both with the physical challenges and the workplace culture. Trippily so coming from academia!
  - cies 2y ago
    The "physical work workplace culture" fits me much better: more fun, less stringent, less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark, no one will go cry to HR for a remark you made that was not even about them personally... It's not a struggle is a relief!
    - tiltowait 2y ago
      I don’t miss many things from my last blue collar job, but it was so much more relaxed. My coworkers all felt much more “real”. Too bad the pay wasn’t there, or I’d still be doing it.
      - clown_strike 2y ago
        There is camaraderie to it; the sense that you're all facing the same struggle together. Nobody is manipulating others by inventing strawman problems to solve because the work is real enough and you all get punished together when it isn't done. Once toil became intellectual (theocratic) is where life becomes insufferable and simply unfun. It amounts to human domestication.
rootusrootus 2y ago
I agree, this is just an expression of the real world, and some people are uncomfortable with that. In my friends & coworkers circle, there are people of all varieties and it is the conservatives who are most honest. This morning they are affirming that the dems lost because a small fraction of the population ("the alphabet people" is the term I am seeing) don't understand their place, that the rest of the world does not want to live by their rules. It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.
- skulk 2y ago
  > It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not It's also hard to have a meaningful conversation with people who uncritically accept all information they hear as long as it's from the right source.
dowager_dan99 2y ago
I'm now a soft-hands, academic-type but worked in a metal fabrication shop all through my schooling. Your read is very accurate. I still get her perspective though, because even as a male, white, straight, married guy in a shop full of the same I found it exhausting.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  What did you find exhausting, specifically? Just trying to understand your comment.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Not GP, but I've made similar transitions: > Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Can be exhausting. You have to either join in, be a target, or both.
    - ein0p 2y ago
      So can "corporate talk" at a white collar job. There are days where I want to vomit after hearing about "stakeholders", "action items", and "alignment". I'd prefer crude jokes to that, even if they were directed at me.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        It's a little different when people are regularly talking about your genitals or sexual preferences or histories or your family reputation. And in public. And in team meetings. That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.
        DiggyJohnson 2y ago
        I think everyone else is assuming a different level and amount of personal insults when we discuss “shop talk”.
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
>But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is
- rascul 2y ago
  Certainly not limited to white men
- millzlane 2y ago
  It's never in fun. I don't mind a good razzing. But when it's constant or every day or you're the only one razzed because people like laughing at your no nonsense attitude when you get riled up at their stupidity it's like living in a courtroom of idiocracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU
mmooss 2y ago
Almost every time someone brings it up, people dismiss sexism, racism, etc. and their impacts. If I want to know the impact of, e.g., weather on farming, or the hurricane, I ask someone who has experienced it. This person had these experiences; you didn't but that's irrelevant. > posh ... highbrow It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.
renewiltord 2y ago
This is common in software too. Like, you make fun of a guy for being from Kansas or generally non smart states as banter, and they'll get all riled up about it. Dude, we're just playing around about the L3 cache latency on a 9684X. It's okay if you don't know it. It's not malicious or anything. Just the amount of elitism this and elitism that. It's folks unfamiliar with an environment and the fact that some of the rough and tumble of life is helped by not being so sensitive. There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.
camgunz 2y ago
> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it. It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.
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- edwbuck 2y ago
  On my way to a "white collar" job, I worked construction. It was stage building, which is the kind of construction that "blue collar" workers routinely laughed at, but it was still hard, physical work. How did I get my promotion that made the job worthwhile? A person fell 30 feet onto concrete. The next week, I was replacing him, with all of the risks he had, and the potential outcome. That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away). People claim "simple" when they mean "my way". People claim lack of "knowing how to use the language" when the wrong ideas get injected into a language (I'm personally looking at you Perl, but now that I'm working Golang, it's starting to feel too familiar). The truth is, there is often more than one way to solve a problem, but an strong willed person won't see it that way. I've walked away from plenty of marginally (and I mean marginally) better solutions just to compromise to some form of a solution than I care to enumerate. One can't win such arguments. I agree, it's not malicious, but is is egotistical. I've even won solutions where I said "Let's all agree that you're right, and then let's accept the code as-is." This industry is improved compared to decades before, but it's not yet fully rational, or even fair.
  - 2y ago
awkward 2y ago
Never welded professionally, but I learned to weld from a few friends, one was a woman who let me into the art school's jewelry shop. She considered welding as a trade, but as someone coming out of college, part of her hesitation was that she'd be starting fresh in the workforce and, as a welder, she'd be on a more senior payscale than many of the people she'd rely on on the job site. It wasn't a dynamic she wanted to be in.
joe_the_user 2y ago
What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one... I read the article. There is zero indications anywhere in the article that this is the case, none. Notably, the authors describes both her experience and the experience of other women. And they don't like but they expect and let it roll off their backs. Sure, some work places have culture of "good-natured razzing" but others have a culture of straight-bullying. Sometimes the bullying comes from people who are damaged themselves and other times it comes from a company or a manager who believes this lets them control their workers (not always incorrectly). Either the bullying doesn't serve the workers. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. A second of thought should show this kind of generalization is impossible. You're engaged in the classic "I know the working class and they are exactly this way" sophistry.
adamtaylor_13 2y ago
Yeah, folks who don't grow up in rural towns or grow up lower-class REALLY don't get this. They get the exact same treatment that you'd get if you were the 14-year-old kid working in the shop with his uncle. You get called names, teased, and tested—it's part of the culture. But instead of recognizing it for what it is, they try to apply labels like "sexism" to it. Or they're "resentful for being tested" as if any shop jockey feels _confident_ the first time they fix an item for a customer. If you don't like the culture, leave it. Stop applying your labels when you don't even understand the world you stepped into. It's like labeling the Native Americans as "savages" just because they don't fit your sensibilities of how the world "ought" to work.
analog31 2y ago
I think, not being able to tell whether someone's being friendly or abusive, is a classic sign that it's probably abusive. Also, abuse is generational, so this may be how people were treated when they were starting out themselves.
- z3ncyberpunk 2y ago
  That's nice, except for those who are professionally offended at everything under the sun. Just because you think something might be abuse, doesn't mean it is. Far too many people, including Gen Z, are entrenched in their self-righteousness and lack the ability to take any form of criticism or use critical thinking.
  - analog31 2y ago
    To me, the cabal of "offended people" is a fiction of propaganda. I haven't met those people in any substantial number, and I live in a famously woke enclave. It's a meme, not necessarily related to reality. Another cabal of "offended people" who may have decided the recent presidential election, are those who are offended by any frank description of the economic and social conditions of the working class. For instance, this week David Brooks of the NY Times lamented that the Democrats failed to "respect" the working class. "Abandoning the working class" is also a fiction of propaganda. The head of the Democratic party rightfully called it BS.

scotty79 2y ago

> Any difference is going to be a target. Those are primary school rules. Seeing adults living like that is shocking.

rootusrootus 2y ago
Primary schoolers are the sweetest people in the world. It is middle schoolers that express adult emotions with no filter. Fortunately the filter does get more effective with practice, but it is always worth remembering that at their core, most people are not fundamentally different than they were in middle school.
verisimi 2y ago
Seeing adults pretending not to notice differences is also shocking, funny too.
- scotty79 2y ago
  I'm sure they see the differences, just decide to evaluate them as irrelevant. Which is their right as adults.

Rendello 2y ago

It was interesting for me going from interacting with wealthy, educated developers, to working in a very physical, low-paying blue-collar job. It seemed like living in two different worlds almost. > working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics I'm curious to what you mean by this

naming_the_user 2y ago
I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence. I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc. Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  > find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.
  - naming_the_user 2y ago
    Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).

graemep 2y ago
Do the women have to be the "care taker" and the men the "provider"? The proportion of jobs in developed economies that require physical strength is much lower than it used to be. As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer. I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Not everyone has to be - I do about half the childcare of my daughter and am often the odd-man-out at child activities. But most people have to be because that's what each sex wants. It's not a great plan to be looking for a partner by not having a job and telling everyone that your goal is to be a stay-at-home dad who wants a high-earning wife to support him. Women aren't interested in that.
  - graemep 2y ago
    That is true but it is exactly what I think the problem is. Women do want careers as good as those of men. There are huge efforts made to equalise numbers of women in various careers (especially high paying ones and in senior positions). I do not see how this can work without men taking on more traditionally female roles. IMO we should make it more acceptable for men to be stay at home dads, just as we have made it acceptable (and entirely normal) for women to do a lot of traditionally male jobs.

neilv 2y ago

I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that's the only factor in everything the article described, and it's not specific to blue collar work. There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too. Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism. Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects. You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.

deleted 2y ago
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mydriasis 2y ago
It's even worse. The educated tech industry workers don't actually make any banter, so any time their prejudices slip through, it's just their actual opinions instead of banter. It's a very bizarre opposite to the supposedly 'uneducated' blue collar way of doing things, which brings levity as a first-class citizen, and communicates boundaries well. You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense. Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules. It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one. People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.

mschuster91 2y ago

> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers. At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages. (The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)

stavros 2y ago
This is like someone telling a fish that there are people who live on land, and the fish saying "it doesn't have to be that way". Someone mentions a cultural difference between your group and another, and you say "the other group is wrong, my culture is right". Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.
- skinkestek 2y ago
  Someone with background from from the US military (OK, Ryan McBeth) recently commented something along the lines of: > everyone is picked on. If you don't get picked on that is reason for concern. By quoting this, do I mean to encourage bullying? No, as the kid that wasn't included during my first years of school, NO. But there is a difference between everyone calling each other names vs everyone calling someone names etc.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago

esperent 2y ago

> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.

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yCombLinks 2y ago
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wyager 2y ago
If you have this attitude, you aren't cut out to work in the trades
- mock-possum 2y ago
  The trades need to change then. What you and others are so blithely defending in this thread is textbook toxic behavior.
  - wyager 2y ago
    What exactly is your plan to achieve this "needed" change?
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      Ooh, that’s a great shutdown, do you use it when someone brings up male suicide rates too?
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      Academia and the managerial class are going to lecture blue collar workers from the luxury of their remote offices, same as it ever was.

aaplok 2y ago

Well there is this though: > Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead. There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.

orwin 2y ago
I think GP is right though. Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
- notahacker 2y ago
  See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs. But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
  - dmix 2y ago
    He claimed “more prevalent” not “only white collar does x”
    - notahacker 2y ago
      He also claimed the ass-grabs and demeaning remarks will "always" be from managers [without trade experience]. Which is wild.
      - orwin 2y ago
        It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that). But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy). I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?

jrflowers 2y ago

I love this post. It not only makes no sense whatsoever, it flattens gender, race, being ginger, and having tattoos into one uniform measure of Otherness in a way that preserves a magical naïveté and childlike wonder that’s absent in virtually every adult

brownJorts 2y ago
Crafting grammatically correct sentences doesn’t rewrite immutable physics. https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becoming-more-widely-acceptable-linguistics-experts-c https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becomi... Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us. People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die. Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.
- deleted 2y ago
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- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  What are you trying to say?

mplewis 2y ago

It’s never malicious when you’re the one having fun, huh?

kardianos 2y ago

A lot of the specifics mentioned in the article aren't specific to her being a woman. Many guys just talk about things differently; they will banter about themselves and how any lady is easier on the eyes then any man. That's not sexism; that's just reality of what a guy thinks and banters about. And an average guy is stronger then the average girl; that's biology. Most guys don't care what sex you are, so long as you can do the work, don't complain much, and can afford banter to make the day go by faster.

Neil44 2y ago
I thought similar. Anyone moving from an office environment to one of physical work is going to struggle both with the physical challenges and the workplace culture. Trippily so coming from academia!
- cies 2y ago
  The "physical work workplace culture" fits me much better: more fun, less stringent, less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark, no one will go cry to HR for a remark you made that was not even about them personally... It's not a struggle is a relief!
  - tiltowait 2y ago
    I don’t miss many things from my last blue collar job, but it was so much more relaxed. My coworkers all felt much more “real”. Too bad the pay wasn’t there, or I’d still be doing it.
    - clown_strike 2y ago
      There is camaraderie to it; the sense that you're all facing the same struggle together. Nobody is manipulating others by inventing strawman problems to solve because the work is real enough and you all get punished together when it isn't done. Once toil became intellectual (theocratic) is where life becomes insufferable and simply unfun. It amounts to human domestication.

rootusrootus 2y ago

I agree, this is just an expression of the real world, and some people are uncomfortable with that. In my friends & coworkers circle, there are people of all varieties and it is the conservatives who are most honest. This morning they are affirming that the dems lost because a small fraction of the population ("the alphabet people" is the term I am seeing) don't understand their place, that the rest of the world does not want to live by their rules. It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.

skulk 2y ago
> It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not It's also hard to have a meaningful conversation with people who uncritically accept all information they hear as long as it's from the right source.

dowager_dan99 2y ago

I'm now a soft-hands, academic-type but worked in a metal fabrication shop all through my schooling. Your read is very accurate. I still get her perspective though, because even as a male, white, straight, married guy in a shop full of the same I found it exhausting.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
What did you find exhausting, specifically? Just trying to understand your comment.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Not GP, but I've made similar transitions: > Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Can be exhausting. You have to either join in, be a target, or both.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    So can "corporate talk" at a white collar job. There are days where I want to vomit after hearing about "stakeholders", "action items", and "alignment". I'd prefer crude jokes to that, even if they were directed at me.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      It's a little different when people are regularly talking about your genitals or sexual preferences or histories or your family reputation. And in public. And in team meetings. That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.
      - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
        I think everyone else is assuming a different level and amount of personal insults when we discuss “shop talk”.

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

>But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is

rascul 2y ago
Certainly not limited to white men
millzlane 2y ago
It's never in fun. I don't mind a good razzing. But when it's constant or every day or you're the only one razzed because people like laughing at your no nonsense attitude when you get riled up at their stupidity it's like living in a courtroom of idiocracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU

mmooss 2y ago

Almost every time someone brings it up, people dismiss sexism, racism, etc. and their impacts. If I want to know the impact of, e.g., weather on farming, or the hurricane, I ask someone who has experienced it. This person had these experiences; you didn't but that's irrelevant. > posh ... highbrow It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.

renewiltord 2y ago

This is common in software too. Like, you make fun of a guy for being from Kansas or generally non smart states as banter, and they'll get all riled up about it. Dude, we're just playing around about the L3 cache latency on a 9684X. It's okay if you don't know it. It's not malicious or anything. Just the amount of elitism this and elitism that. It's folks unfamiliar with an environment and the fact that some of the rough and tumble of life is helped by not being so sensitive. There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.

camgunz 2y ago

> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it. It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.

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edwbuck 2y ago
On my way to a "white collar" job, I worked construction. It was stage building, which is the kind of construction that "blue collar" workers routinely laughed at, but it was still hard, physical work. How did I get my promotion that made the job worthwhile? A person fell 30 feet onto concrete. The next week, I was replacing him, with all of the risks he had, and the potential outcome. That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away). People claim "simple" when they mean "my way". People claim lack of "knowing how to use the language" when the wrong ideas get injected into a language (I'm personally looking at you Perl, but now that I'm working Golang, it's starting to feel too familiar). The truth is, there is often more than one way to solve a problem, but an strong willed person won't see it that way. I've walked away from plenty of marginally (and I mean marginally) better solutions just to compromise to some form of a solution than I care to enumerate. One can't win such arguments. I agree, it's not malicious, but is is egotistical. I've even won solutions where I said "Let's all agree that you're right, and then let's accept the code as-is." This industry is improved compared to decades before, but it's not yet fully rational, or even fair.
- 2y ago

awkward 2y ago

Never welded professionally, but I learned to weld from a few friends, one was a woman who let me into the art school's jewelry shop. She considered welding as a trade, but as someone coming out of college, part of her hesitation was that she'd be starting fresh in the workforce and, as a welder, she'd be on a more senior payscale than many of the people she'd rely on on the job site. It wasn't a dynamic she wanted to be in.

joe_the_user 2y ago

What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one... I read the article. There is zero indications anywhere in the article that this is the case, none. Notably, the authors describes both her experience and the experience of other women. And they don't like but they expect and let it roll off their backs. Sure, some work places have culture of "good-natured razzing" but others have a culture of straight-bullying. Sometimes the bullying comes from people who are damaged themselves and other times it comes from a company or a manager who believes this lets them control their workers (not always incorrectly). Either the bullying doesn't serve the workers. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not. A second of thought should show this kind of generalization is impossible. You're engaged in the classic "I know the working class and they are exactly this way" sophistry.

adamtaylor_13 2y ago

Yeah, folks who don't grow up in rural towns or grow up lower-class REALLY don't get this. They get the exact same treatment that you'd get if you were the 14-year-old kid working in the shop with his uncle. You get called names, teased, and tested—it's part of the culture. But instead of recognizing it for what it is, they try to apply labels like "sexism" to it. Or they're "resentful for being tested" as if any shop jockey feels _confident_ the first time they fix an item for a customer. If you don't like the culture, leave it. Stop applying your labels when you don't even understand the world you stepped into. It's like labeling the Native Americans as "savages" just because they don't fit your sensibilities of how the world "ought" to work.

analog31 2y ago

I think, not being able to tell whether someone's being friendly or abusive, is a classic sign that it's probably abusive. Also, abuse is generational, so this may be how people were treated when they were starting out themselves.

z3ncyberpunk 2y ago
That's nice, except for those who are professionally offended at everything under the sun. Just because you think something might be abuse, doesn't mean it is. Far too many people, including Gen Z, are entrenched in their self-righteousness and lack the ability to take any form of criticism or use critical thinking.
- analog31 2y ago
  To me, the cabal of "offended people" is a fiction of propaganda. I haven't met those people in any substantial number, and I live in a famously woke enclave. It's a meme, not necessarily related to reality. Another cabal of "offended people" who may have decided the recent presidential election, are those who are offended by any frank description of the economic and social conditions of the working class. For instance, this week David Brooks of the NY Times lamented that the Democrats failed to "respect" the working class. "Abandoning the working class" is also a fiction of propaganda. The head of the Democratic party rightfully called it BS.