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

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254 points Michelangelo11 | 2 comments | 06 Nov 24 00:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | source
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naming_the_user ◴[06 Nov 24 01:47 UTC] No.42056718[source]▶
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.

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camgunz ◴[06 Nov 24 19:27 UTC] No.42067884[source]▶
> 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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1. edwbuck ◴[06 Nov 24 21:05 UTC] No.42069376[source]▶
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.

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2. joe_the_user ◴[06 Nov 24 21:36 UTC] No.42069825[source]▶
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).

As a programmer, I've worked in places and with people who were straight-up sociopathically abusive and I've worked with people who were absolutely respectful and reasonable and groups that were in-between. The co-workers, the boss, the company and location's culture all went into this.

Thing about this is - since it is variable, since it is not necessary, there's no excuse for it as a natural thing, in any industry. Also, while sometimes it's the result just dysfunction (the "tolerant" boss who tolerates psycho team lead) but often it's a strategy for extracting more work for people (at Intel, for example).