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comment by Relevant_Anxiety
Relevant_Anxiety  ·  1888 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Fight Over Men Is Shaping Our Political Future

I work in tech and I've worked for both the "brogrammer" type shops and the "Silicon Valley SJW hugbox" type shops and by far prefer the latter. That collaborative environment isn't just more pleasant to work for; a team is going to collectively get much better at their jobs and produce better work when people aren't focused on getting their slice of the pie, but instead just trying to bake more pies. When employees aren't worried about their coworkers edging them out for the next promotion, or during the next round of stack-ranked layoffs, they are much more willing to help their coworkers learn new things, and everyone has a slightly different area of expertise so everyone is always learning from each other. There's also no point to wasting time on backstabby office politics games so nobody does.

I think it's also really important to emphasize that this is traditional masculinity vs traditional femininity, not men versus women. At my current "feminine-style" shop, the culture was intentionally shaped this way by an almost-all-male executive team. I've also worked for women managers who had only ever seen the "brogrammer" side of industry and so they recreated that in their management, and the results were always just as miserable as when implemented by a man. The only people who will get left behind are the people who insist on being left behind, and there's no actual material reason that a bunch of working-class CNC guys couldn't run a more mutually-supportive CNC shop.





kleinbl00  ·  1886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I think it's also really important to emphasize that this is traditional masculinity vs traditional femininity, not men versus women.

I agree with your emphasis. It's worth pointing out that the jewelry program is run by a woman who came up in the '70s and has survived for 20 years in a department legendary for its sexism (until a metoo purge cleaned things up a bit last year) while the CNC program was run by a man who came up in the '70s and has survived for 20 years in a department where it was apparently OK to tell women that "girls just aren't as good at this as men are."

The problem is? People follow the examples they know, as you pointed out. I'm hoping as the general work environment ditches the traditional masculinity, the traditionally masculine shops and exemplars stand down.