I know Alpine Linux uses IRC for development. https://alpinelinux.org/community/

I go there from time to time when I have an issue I can’t figure out myself.

It’s mature and simple which is why I believe it’s used more often by developers.

My store uses a similar tag. It points to the price of the product on the shelf to indicate the product is “Canadian.”

If you look to the right of the board, you can see the tag tucked into the shelf.

Canada

Strength sometimes takes a lot of patience to help a person fuck up in front of the wrong line of people.

That’s very much what I did. While causing noise with management, I made friends with someone who worked for corporate HR. My first email to her basically predicated what would happen if I raised a complaint to management. I gained her trust by focusing on changing the work culture and not looking for retribution.

I got terminated, lawyers got involved and in the end I got a my severance and banned from working with that international corporate. The HR manager of my company was forced into leaving the company before her retirement. If I didn’t play nice with corporate HR, the company HR manager would have probably worked until retirement like nothing happened.

I now have a new hate for bureaucracy that’s on a deep and personal level but at least I came out with some wins at the cost of some sanity.

The grey walls of the workplace somehow lost even more colour after that realization

All the things I had to do to protect myself from manipulative people.

They needed my attention. I became more independent and denied giving them any attention. They don’t like that I’m not giving them the attention they think they deserve so they try and turn everyone against me.

It happens often because I’m quiet and kind. They think that makes me easy to manipulate. I’ve become hardened to manipulators. So much to the point that physical touch with other people has become awkward or uncomfortable.

The trades are the same way, unfortunately. When the first woman apprentice showed up, all these guys started acting like they’ve never seen a woman before.

The quiet guy who I thought was one of the nicest people there told the apprentice that she belonged in an office. Others wouldn’t let her do anything “dangerous” or over explained all the simple shit to her. Others would just hang around her for uncomfortable periods of time. It was truly bizarre to witness.

She ended up only coming to me for work related questions because I was one of the few people who treated her like a person and not like a little girl. That’s how I found out all the gross and fucked up things the guys were saying to her. She didn’t last long and left for another company which already had women working there. I worked until I got terminated for bringing up issues with the work culture.

During the fight about work culture with management, the vast majority of my coworkers turned their backs on me. Treated me like an idiot and isolated me. They were all so fragile and scared they would have to change their awful ways.

I ended up quitting my apprenticeship and decided to never return to the trades. I can’t stand the culture and I no longer have the energy to fight alone.

Any woman that can remain in the trades or STEM is way stronger than I’ll ever be. I couldn’t imagine myself dealing with that shit daily for an entire life.

I was building an automation line that was going to be used to manufacture the battery tray for Hummers. When I found out in 2020 that my workplace was considered essential service during the covid lockdowns, I pretty much lost my mind. Stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.

There’s nothing essential about an electric Hummer.

I don’t work there anymore.

I don’t have any answer but I feel your pain. Years ago I wanted to learn C++ for Arduino and asking questions always seemed to have answers that talked down to me and made me feel stupid for asking.

I even tried proving that I made an effort to learn before asking. That didn’t work either. People were still rude.

I gave up.

Years later I got into into Linux and started learning POSIX scripting and self-hosting. I again tried asking questions but still received mostly rude answers but this time there were people in the mix of replies that did try to help. It was slightly better.

I tried showing off a script I was proud of but I did something wrong and people rudely let me know about my mistake. They took no effort to educate me on why it was wrong. I asked for a reason to understand what I did wrong but was left with silence.

I didn’t give up this time but I stopped asking for help and I’m still afraid to show off my projects.

It’s the exact same bullshit I experienced in the trades. I quit my apprenticeship and left the trades because people refused to understand that someone else with less experience won’t instinctively know all the basics. Starting something new is overwhelming and it’s hard to retain all that information the first time learning it all.

I feel like rudeness towards beginners is one of the biggest hypocrisies when so much of progress is built on sharing knowledge.

One lesson I learned from a this is that I either take the time to answer a question fully or don’t. I can at least feel good about the few times I spent answering a question. The people that asked the question were always appreciative of the time and effort I took to help them understand what they wanted to know.

Management there enabled the culture of agism, sexism and racism by not addressing the issues. They have a history of this that can be traced to the human rights tribunal in this country. Multiple times. He was the top person in the company. If no one below him is listening, where was I to go to make my complaint? If he cared so much about family, it would not have gotten to that point.

I asked to address the work culture in the company. I didn’t just focus on agism, I made sure to speak up about racism, sexism and the unfair treatment of all the contractors working there.

The corporate HR person I was working with saw I was motivated to change the culture and had no interest in money or retribution. She not only supported me but was encouraging me to join an employee representative position that helped employees at a corporate level rather than at a company level. It has a name which I forgot.

I would have taken that position with the intention to be as annoying as possible or make an even bigger statement later. I was going to get fired but I wasn’t going to quit and give them the satisfaction of me chickening out first.

I stand by my actions and motivations.

Also, the young people failing was a reflection of the older generation’s failure to adequately train them. I’ve noticed this a lot with boomers. They’re so addicted to their feelings of superiority that they’ll sabotage people’s progress just so they can continue looking down on them. That phenomenon is at the core of many socioeconomic and political problems today.

I agree with all of that because I experienced it first hand. I was often shunned because I never listened to their outdated or blindly ignorant advice and bullied for trying to take the initiative to learn for myself. It took me a while afterwards to understand that being me and doing what I thought was right for myself made them feel threatened enough to lash out at me.

Oh, I was referring to what was happening within our workplace. The older workers refused to teach the apprentices anything. They expected us to just know stuff and treated us like idiot slaves when we inevitably failed. Apprentices were constantly thrown under the bus when something went wrong.

There was a huge knowledge gap between the older and younger workers. Those older guys were years away from retiring and were leaving us younger workers with no knowledge. Knowledge we need to pass our classes and grow as trades people.

The GM’s message was meaningless because it was all words but no actual meaning or support for younger workers. He’s a petty child who hated younger people and queer people in particular.

I once went up at a monthly meeting, grabbed the mic out of the General Manager’s hand and complained about how he keeps saying how important it is for all the older trade workers to teach the younger workers and how that’s not the reality. The GM began going off about family and then I blacked out and said some wild shit.

Ended up having a meeting with the Fairness Committee member (who was just another company management puppet) and a 3.5 hour long meeting with HR who blamed me for everything the entire time.

I spent the next 10 months making friends with Corporate HR while antagonizing management at my company with the hidden support of Corporates HR.

I got fired, told corporate. All eyes were on my company and they were forced to make huge changes all at the cost of the GM’s yearly bonus. I sent a complaint to the labour board about a wrongful termination and as soon as it was formally entered, the HR manager was forced into early retirement and gone within a month. I still got my severance plus a little extra for lawyer fees.

The company had to scramble for a new HR manager but that person entered hell and mentally clocked out so the HR department is unable to do their job effectively.

If their idea of family is to play corporate games, then I played corporate games. What an absolutely fucked up mentality to have but those people are dead behind the eyes because they only care about an object called money. Buncha racist, sexist, weird and pathetic beings. I’ve seen a piece or shit nuture more life and create a more liveable future compared to them.