Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

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.

What did you find exhausting, specifically? Just trying to understand your comment.

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.

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.

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.

I've found that the shop talk communities end up with stronger bonds and generally more real friendships vs office friendships which are very weak.

It makes me think it's a somewhat innate way to foster relationships. It definitely seems to break down walls. I've come to learn that the more a group roasts you the more they like you.

I kind of agree...

My strongest lifelong work friends definitely came from grad school where none of that happened. Or from research work where it didn't either. But there it was pressure and performance and cooperation that helped. It breeds trust.

In blue collar work, esp team oriented which it often is, I'm not sure it's the shop talk or the team/trust environment. Either way i felt the same bond to people making pizza 5 busy nights in a row as I did late night coding sprints while pair programming, or contorting under the steel hull of a target boat to reach a bad CPU while my colleague watched the terminal while seasick and we are both drinking diesel funes.

It's about shared trust I think. The level of casualness of shop talk is just an indicator and kind of a stress test of bonds.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. It's something about the level of pressure but a lot of us software guys have pressure but don't get the same relationships blue collar workers get. I've done both industries (industrial construction and programming), and I definitely found it much easier to make lasting friendships in the construction one even though I experienced similar pressures

It's something to do with the casualness or gruffness of it that makes it better. Office environments are so sterile. Maybe it's the lack of HR. lol

Also it's easier to talk, and you're constantly moving around. Focus is paramount in SWeng, which is the same as "leave me alone".

Bonds forged in fire are stronger - this has been known since Rome needed soldiers. Bootcamp doesn't require sleep deprivation, adversarial leadership,and that level of physical strain, but shared suffering increases unit cohesion.

I choose less suffering at my work, I can choose my friends from other circles, thank you very much.

This is an idea that is promoted by the media. Occasionally it is true.

After eight years of working in the military, it only took two years before I never heard from another member of my unit. Within the first three months of leaving, only one person kept in touch (for the two years). When they moved out-of-state, I never heard from them either.

Don't underestimate the perception of what happens with what is likely to happen. I don't think it differs much between "the shop" and "the office" having worked in both. How many people do you talk to on a weekly basis from your last company?

I think everyone else is assuming a different level and amount of personal insults when we discuss “shop talk”.

Another anecdote: my straight white male friend who isn't a tough guy left a job (building commercial ACs) as an electrician because the whole business was full of dudes bullying whoever they could. Plus the management just didn't care about worker safety, and the workers took it as a point of pride that they were ruining their own health. Toxic as hell. He found a different job with less machismo bullshit and more safety and is much happier. But that job is also overnight shift; if he was a single parent that'd be nearly impossible, luckily his wife can stay at home with the kids. This is in rural Virginia, not a ton of jobs around.

My window into the blue collar world has made it look like if you want a job where safety is respected, you probably want a union job. There a macho tendency working against it, and management’s all too happy to let that, plus the implied threat of firing if you become too irritating, erode safe practices, even if they nominally have policies to the contrary.

It REALLY depends. There's as many factors in if you are being ribbed or bullied as there are in friendships. YMMV immensely.

But yes, the best way to bond has often been by putting down others.

Because I've heard different levels and amounts of insults. It can just be some harmless dad jokes and softball stuff you'd hear in white collar work. It can just be outright sexual harassment. It depends so much on your environment that it's hard to pin down a universal "standard" .

Yeah union jobs definitely seem to get all the safety aspect down in my experiences in the US. In some cases in can be a little overzealous, but 99.99% of the time you want to be doing what they recommend and have the tools and safety gear they expect so you don't get maimed or killed just to save somebody else 30 cents. That isn't to say you can't find safe non-union work, but generally you gotta do a bit of job hopping around in most trades to find a safe employer because doing unsafe shit is all too uncommon in trades.

Perhaps because it actively drives away anyone who is not going to build a strong friendship with it.