I felt out of place for about the first six months of working in an office but mostly got over it. I think because I work in the tech industry, no one cares what your economic background is. What school you went to helps a little bit during the hiring process; CMU, Stanford, MIT and Berkeley are defiantly seen as more desirable than state schools or even Ivy League but once you're in a job, it doesn't come up that much.

And as for the anger thing, I've heard just as much yelling and "fuck this shit" in the white collar tech world as I did when I worked in home construction. If anything, the construction workers were more polite than the engineers that I work with now.

My favorite line: "I am actually in the top 25th percentile of angry people."

I think she mixes up a lot of different things.
F.i. not showing that you don't want to work with somebody who's condescending is not necessarily wasp uptightness. Generally superiors want you to be able to deal with things. Change them if necessary. Circumvent them. But don't add complications to the mix.

Also; there are business domains where being very aggressive and direct is the norm. Let's say investment banking or some forms of account management or sales.
But generally my impression is that the anger shouldn't be a form of you being influenced by the environment, being out of control because of your emotions wrt the business goals.

When your work is operational it's about what you get done. Something that the writer mentions with pride as 'the real work'.
But when you get higher up and become responsible for a department it's not about how much you do anymore. Because that doesn't scale. It's also very much about distributed decision making, influencing, gauging aims of competitors etc. That is a dichotomy between operations and tactical management, not between blue and white collar.

I'm not sure that the writer has a firm understanding of upper-middle class norms vs working class norms.

I was just talking with the property manager of my office building today about some harassment I received at the hands of some iron workers that are doing some facade work on our building. (Uninterrupted lewd staring to the point of making me uncomfortable.) Although he said he'd talk to their boss about it, he also said "well, you know, they're iron workers." WTF. As if being a blue-collar union guy makes it ok to intimidate a woman in her workplace.

So while I agree there can be a sheen of passive aggressive bullshit in the office environment because of the go along to get along attitude, there's also something to be said for not laying everything out there all the time. I'm just fine with people keeping their lewd thoughts to themselves, for example.

My workplace suffers from too many meetings, and the occasional passive aggressive power move, but for the most part it's a rewarding collaborative environment. Maybe not all jobs work well as collaborative projects, but some certainly do.

A fun read. As someone who has to watch how direct I get, I enjoyed this:

every office interaction must be smooth like butter. Incredibly fake butter. Like Country Crock.

But I think she's missing some useful information, including that: 1) anger actually is not a productive emotion most of the time at any workplace, blue collar or otherwise; 2) one can motivate very good work, and bring out the best in people, with basic clicker training/positive reinforcement techniques; 3) there are lots of alternatives to anger or endless discussion which allow one to successfully conduct a meeting within a set time and facilitate group decisions.

She's comes across as very bright, but defensive, hostile, and pretty negative about people from more privileged backgrounds. She clearly hasn't gotten any good training on working in groups or leading groups. And her assumption that all upper and middle class people have is sadly mistaken.

There was a pretty good essay called "Class for a Downwardly Mobile Generation" in the collection More Unequal which was similar to this one, discussing the unspoken middle- and upper-class assumptions of university life that made things difficult for working-class students at the author's school.

I thought the handshake thing was insightful. It's not something I naturally do. Plus they've got all these incredibly complicated details about how to do the right handshake.

If such a person offers you a religious pamphlet, take it and say “thank you.” (Do not say, “Goddammit, do I really have to debate another fundamentalist? Jesus, I mean, your high school prohibits interracial dating.”)

You could also not take it with a pleasant, "No thank you."

This writer still has quite a lot to learn, it seems.