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.

And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.

This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.

> And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.

Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.

Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.

Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.

Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.

Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).

At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.

[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.

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.

With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.

And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.

Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.

Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.

I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).

Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.

Professionalism is to keep distance to others, banter is the opposite, as it is a form of bonding.

"Modern" workplaces that advertise themselves as such are very likely toxic. Might seem counter intuitive but it is often the case in reality.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...