askchapo

i get treated like absolute shit by the people i work with, just grinding until i can drop out of society

You don't talk to them, do the hours, go home.

Fuck "friends at work," I'm just there for the paycheck.

many old guard electrical engineers suck, some of them are based. odds are if they've worked primarily in defense they suck ass .

Also pretty much all of the shittiest engineers I've run into tend to be chuds high on being a stemlord.

I have some D&D sessions with some coworkers who are fairly progressive but still basically libs.

The rest as far as I can tell are middle aged pearl clutching neolibs or conservatives. Our manager, whom everyone despises, was trying to get people to open up about the BLM protests that were exploding in our small county a few months back as an attempt to out potential supporters.

And one of the VPs sent a company wide email about my specific branch saying if protests got too close to close the doors and call the cops. I almost literally face palmed at the irony.

The town I am is conservative and unincorporated. The protesters were maybe like 25 college aged people with the only black people in town.

I deal by coming home to a pup and loving partner and absorbing myself in my hobbies and theory. Having mutual aid outlets help too cause those ppl are usually comrades.

I'd love to unionize my workplace but my coworkers are too stupid for me to even try.

Electric utility engineer speaking, yeah most engineers kinda suck. There are a decent number of good ones who are pretty easily radicalized if you can convince them of their privileged position. Within offices, engineers mostly enter as labor aristocracy, and school breeds them as such (also why you see so such insane gender gaps in the field). Less than 70 years ago, the careful construction of the labor aristocracy within the US was paramount to the tasks of the ruling class. Having a nuclear family was all but a written requirement for being in the labor aristocracy, and obviously the category was reserved for the male 'breadwinner'. I don't think I even need to mention the racial component here, which is obvious.

We can see how this labor aristocracy developed within the US quite clearly. Engineering and engineering management was near the peak of the labor aristocracy up until the 80's, as the proletarian pressure provided by the USSR released and the US entered its "High Finance" stage of hegemonic accumulation. The shining example of labor aristocracy became advertising, banking, investments, general business, etc. But the engineering sector of the labor aristocracy maintained its white picket fence character. I can't speak for the software/computer hardware sectors, but in the physical engineering sector, a large majority of the engineers still live in the 50's, even those just graduating college. It's so incredibly demoralizing to see and interact with.