The Class Divide Is Alive And Well
The most undesirable traits still survive in the Grand Game, and I’m not talking about C++ inheritance either.
I’m sure that we can already agree that any form of electronic communication in the modern workplace is almost dystopian in nature and should be treated in equal trepidation to the discussion of Levi jeans, Coca-Cola, or Pizza Hut in the Cold War era of the German Democratic Republic¹.
IT already records everything, under the pretence of “security” in public documentation available on SharePoint², but all the while is really monitoring adherence to the correct ideology when it presents its findings in closed “strategy and compliance” meetings with the upper echelons of both HR and management.
Fortunately, the spoken word is a little more difficult to monitor, and therefore control, in the modern workplace as we tend to move around a bit, open offices are inherently chaotically noisy, and most of us work remotely now anyway³.
Since we what we used to call class, or the white collar / blue collar divide, in the old days is now pretty rare to experience in most workplaces — especially the Grand Game of Software Engineering — something new had to be found to take its place in order to establish a communications and interaction hierarchy (i.e. stop managers having to talk to non-managers except when…
