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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> You report the incident to who you are directed to report into and are told to, "man up."

Given that you also mention further down a dev getting punched, I think this statement was code for “if you don’t like what they’re saying, you should just shut them up.”

Machismo-driven cultures are confusing until you realize that everyone is just expecting you to literally physically assault your way to the top, and is just annoyed with you for seeking peaceful resolutions rather than immediately jumping to violence / intimidation. In such societies, (public) peaceful resolutions lower the social status of both parties making them!

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Quitting and chosing a better place to work is a perfectly valid way to claw your way to the top. Your top. Not their top.

Changing a job is not easy; it requires strength too. It's not always the right thing to do, but it's not necessarily a sign of weakness; au contraire.

Certainly! I’m just making a statement about their expectations — not about the epistemological value of living up to them. (Probably negative.)

Still, if you’re born in a country with a machismo based culture, where “opting out” is much harder, it’s good to be aware of what game is being played!

Not only countries, but also entire industries can be like that. As long as you work in a broadly similar industry, you're likely to quit a bad job only to land in an equally bad job.

How would one even figure out which countries, on average, would be more likely to have cultures like that? It's not like one can just Google "countries with machismo culture" and get meaningful results with studies that attempt to quantify it.

> to literally physically assault your way to the top

I don't think that's the expectation. I think if the author would punch the lights out of the screamer, he wouldn't be congratulated and promoted, but probably fired on the spot and maybe also arrested and sued. In those kinds of companies, the shit usually flows only one way. Some people are "just this way" and you're expected to treat them specially, but you don't get to be "this way".

isn’t this the definition of toxic masculinity?

If it’s not it’s at least a functional basis one.

It has overlap, but it's not a 1:1 mapping. Genpop in most women's prisons has a machismo-driven culture, despite there being little masculinity involved.

Machismo is kind of just an expected output of certain game-theoretic conditions.

Street gangs, for example, are effectively corporation-like entities enacting machismo as an output of the organization — where the public face / "PR department" of the gang enacts domination/intimidation tactics upon symbolic representatives of other gangs in a way that can only be described as "machismo-driven." The same Nash equilibrium that gives rise to street gangs, also makes it so that it's [economically] Pareto-optimal for them to interact with each-other this way.

And this is despite no individual member of the gang necessarily being machismo-driven themselves. Gang members can "give rise to" corporate machismo entirely dispassionately, as an output of "just serving their role", in the same way that employees of a corporation can "give rise to" corporate profit-seeking entirely dispassionately, as an output of "just doing their job." No cog in the machine necessarily approves of what the machine as a whole is doing, but the machine does it all the same.

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