Values, the roots, are so different they bear different fruit. Learning the new fruit and reverse engineering its roots you become aware of what most never do. You are a fish that discovers water.
Scarcity and abundance are so different that unless you’ve experienced both you really will not understand.
Becoming a SWE changed all of this for me and I’ve noticed the culture, especially in FAANG is so wealthy.
Minimalism, aka the confidence to be able to acquire anything you may need at the moment with resources always available to you, is a class indicator.
I chose to intern at the firm that took the leftovers.
Of course each individual action of preventing waste isn't a 100% indicator for having grown up in poverty. Low-waste is arguably fashionable, even. But being low-waste is different from acquiring and retaining arbitrary stuff to use later in place of things you can just buy when you need it. Buying a reusable straw is different from keeping every disposable straw you're given, same as buying a reusable bag is different from keeping every takeout/grocery plastic one. The house of my parents displays my impoverished childhood clearly-- it is a place of incredible resourcefulness using all the things people normally refuse to acquire or throw away if given to them.
That wasn't the point of my story, so it would have been a distraction to mention. Even now, 20 years later, I have a drawer stuffed with free napkins, and I've kept some ketchup packets so long they burst.
I was keeping my reply succinct, and the point was that it stands out when wealthy people take home leftovers, and some people view that as a positive thing.
That may not be your point in this comment, but in your original comment you listed several things (taking home leftovers, keeping sauce packets, hanging onto free pens) that you labeled as low-class indicators. These are only indicators of being low-class if they are not done by a significant number of non-low-class people.
My point was that there are actually some people who are quite wealthy/comfortable who do these things also, and that some people (like law-school-me) react positively to it. The point is that people who do this because of their current situation or past situation need not feel embarrassed or odd for doing this, because some people see it as practical and commonsense.
This is not even getting into issues where a lot of people let actual class discrimination fly live in the office, overtly insult people from my background, or say things about being scared regarding being near section 8 people. I could go on for a long time.
I'm gonna say this in the nicest way possible: I know what you mean, but at the same time it's not about class or personal issues. When you return from the weekend, people don't want to learn every single excruciating detail on whether your leg was in pain, your child threw its ice cream on the floor, etc. The question "how was your weekend" is a "nicety". They don't want the literal description, just a "doing well".
I'm saying this as someone with chronic pain, insomnia problems, and in spite of being a developer low quality of life. I learned to hide my reality, and found out that my mere description of my reality is for them an emotional frustration akin to watching a drama on TV. People just don't want to feel bad, even if it's through proxy.
That's why my daily standups at work has two people talking about their weekend playing tennis and hitting up concerts, when I can barely afford a video game because of the inherent uncertainty of employment and my monthly expenses on top of my medical condition bills.
If you ever move to europe, you will find that even when people didn't really want to know, they understand that they did, in fact, ask the question. (If you don't have time, the polite thing is to greet* but not inquire)
Q. How do you confuse an American?
A. When they ask how you are, tell them.
* a folk etymology of "howdy!" is that it evolved from the vestigial use of "how do you do?" You could pretend, when your cow-orkers ask how you are, that they really meant to say "howdy, pardner!" (in a VR-mediated world, this could be automated via filter?)
fun fact: cowhands and SWEs both sometimes ask each other "how's the stock doing?"
If you go to punk shows, be punk. Recall: it is an attitude.
(If you went to a metal \m/ show, be punk anyway. Ever been to Wacken?)
You may be amused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English or https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/
Once you realise how much the desire for conformity stems from their own insecurities, it's easier to let all the petit bourgeois concerns roll off you like muddy water off a lotus.
In my experience these sorts of behaviors are pervasive, as noted they are subconscious, and their impacts are very real. The biggest problem is that you need to avoid expressing your needs and sidestep the headwind while additionally dealing with the emotional impacts while being expected to over deliver relative to peers.
[edit: I'm sorry. Some challenging topics here. Rather than visiting your intentions, I should ask: do you want these types of experiences not to be a part of hidden worlds around you?]
You sound like a typical software engineer, tons of software engineers has such hobbies. Your problem seems to be more that you judge others thinking they will shun you for liking those things instead of opening up to find people like you, trust me there are a ton of software engineers who would love to talk about your hobbies.
If you talked about managers or lawyers then you'd have a point, they are more uptight. But software engineers often live extremely frugally and come with all kinds of hobbies and backgrounds, they usually don't care about social norms that much.
If you are aiming for director positions, yea, it's different story. Pro-tip - it won't be enough to pretend, they are mostly all related or went to the same school, worked together before, etc. So acting the same won't help much either.
In other words, as a SWE, you are blowing this way out of proportion.
If you feel that pressure just practice what you should for all people: empathy. Listen and ask questions before you speak. This goes with all crowds. Be curious and find the common ground first. Everyone has some, regardless of class.
Who you are is a software engineer that gets the bills paid. Why would it be a "disguise" to act like upper class and not a disguise to act like lower class? If you weren't upper class you could never pretend to be it over long periods.
Just face reality of who you are and have become. Your past is no more "the real you" than your present. You and me and everybody reading this grew up walking around in diapers, that doesn't mean that it is the "real us". It's just the past, it's gone, good bye.
For a practical example, nearly every single Black man who succeed(ed) in America doesn't speak so-called "Negro English", they all speak "normal" English. President Obama is perhaps the most familiar example. I have no doubt at least some of this is them putting on an act to demonstrate they are in the same social class as their would-be peers.
And on the other side of that coin, lower class Black men generally disparage characteristics of the higher classes such as being educated and carrying yourself more formally.
For better or worse, if you want to join a different social class you have to put up some act to get your foot in the door. Otherwise you'll be kicked right out. It's brutally unfortunate, but humans (and all living beings in general) prefer those who are alike and disdain those who aren't.
Hell, the audience here should look at themselves in a mirror: White shirt upper-middle class discriminating the elite upper class and the commonly middle and lower classes is everywhere. Screw those MBAs, amirite? The problem is Joe over there doesn't understand tech, amirite?
And Obama? What makes you believe he would speak "Negro English"? He is not from that background.
The truth is that people can't really join a different social class without fundamentally belonging to that class. And belonging to a class depends on what you presently do and have, not what you did or had in your past. If the commenter was not a software engineer, no acting of his could fool people for a long time. With the exception for expert con-men. So even though he might feel as if he's faking it, the part that really counts is real.
I've been treated as shit thousands of times in my life, for no reason, and treated well ten times more, also for no reason. We get these things in our heads that it's about us and that we're the victims of a world of discrimination, but what it was in reality is that we met some rude people and some jerks.
To get your foot into the door at all, as you mentioned, you have to demonstrate some value. Is that an act? I wouldn't say it is. I would even say that many people will have more patience and be more open to you if you're from a different background than them, or if you're young. The demands to be considered a part of polite society are usually low, so that anybody who wants to participate can enter. Politeness is first, which is free to learn and free to execute. Apart from that you need clean clothes and a clean person. Does that mean other people have to like you? No. If you're from a rough background and move into a different rough neighborhood, the people there will not necessarily like you either.
The point is that social class analysis is not like high school set theory or naive OOP class declarations. The "proletariat" or "capitalist" classes are more about aggregate social phenomena rather than localizable in each individual. Each individual has characteristics of both working-class and capitalist roles. This is true of all social class categories.
> being punished by peers and family for trying to educate myself and other people in this position trying to educate themselves
Well yeah, that does suck and it's a terrible thing to do.
I also grew up very poor and while I tried to hide that fact during university, it makes no sense to hide it from my colleagues because we’re all basically in the same position now.