Straddler: A Working-Class Man’s Guide to Corporate Survival

How a Refinery Worker's Son Crossed the Divide to Thrive in Big Tech

I still remember my first staff meeting at BusinessWeek magazine—high atop the gleaming McGraw Hill building, perched like an eagle’s nest overlooking Manhattan. Editors arrived with cups of steaming coffee and leather-bound notepads, slipping effortlessly into a well-rehearsed ritual they’d played out a hundred times before. Below, the city throbbed with energy—morning rush office workers quickly scurried like a colony of hurried fireflies, weaving through the concrete jungle. For me, it was my moment to fade into the background and watch in awe as the seasoned pros performed.

My only mission: blend into the shadows, remain invisible and silent.

Editors rose one after another, pitching stories with the practiced ease of battle-hardened veterans—slick and polished, all seasoned players in this high-stakes game. When Steve Shepard, the editor-in-chief, challenged a pitch, the senior technology editor pivoted effortlessly, spinning a new angle from the thin thread of critique.

“Boy, you’re good at this dance,” Steve quipped with a knowing smile.

I thought, This is the big leagues. And there I was—still warming the bench, studying the moves.

Hours earlier, my briefcase had popped open on a Manhattan sidewalk. Papers and toiletries tumbled out—toothbrush, shampoo, shaving cream. My boss laughed. It was my first plane trip outside Texas. My blue-collar roots were showing like a neon sign.

I kept my mouth shut, terrified my Texas drawl would give me away.

I would be doing this dance for years as I jumped from journalism into the tech world- Big Tech-until I learned my way. The trick was changing just enough to play the game, and not lose myself in the process.

Valero refinery, Port Arthur, TX

I grew up in Port Neches, Texas—population 10,000- just down the road from Port Arthur, which was once the largest refining center in the world. I grew up surrounded by refineries and chemical plants. My dad worked in a refinery for thirteen years before cancer took him. When he needed help building our home, five work buddies showed up. His father drove in from Alabama. People helped each other.

Friday nights meant packed football stadiums (Think Friday Night Lights). Sundays meant church, where a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher made sure you knew where you stood with God. People generally treated each other with kindness and respect. That’s how I was taught.

Years later at Intel, a few weeks into my first corporate job, a colleague looked at me skeptically: “You look too happy. Walk fast and look dead serious, like you’re carrying the world on your shoulders.”

Welcome to Big Tech and the white-collar world.

You’re Just Too Nice

“You’re too quiet and not aggressive enough,” my boss told me in my first annual performance review at Intel. “Too deferential. Too nice.”

It might seem odd that a journalist would be viewed as too nice. After all, I’d been butting heads with executives and their PR people for years, writing tough stories for tough editors.

But as a journalist, I dropped the nice guy facade once I started writing the story; I could hide behind my keyboard. In tech, there was no hiding. You had to be constantly engaged, mixing it up, challenging assumptions, being seen. My boss was blunt: “If you’re not engaging, people think you’re stupid.”

At Intel, you were expected to challenge your peers constantly. Intel called it “constructive confrontation.” I called it a knife fight with PowerPoint slides.

Intel was brutal by design. Andy Grove—who escaped the Holocaust to lead Intel into becoming a global tech power—cultivated this fighting culture. His mantra rang constantly in my head: Only the paranoid survive.

It was a Darwinian, dog eat dog place where ambiguity ruled.

One day a nervous temp admin who had been brought in to help our group kept asking, “It’s okay, right?”

Finally, a colleague corrected her: “Sadie, at Intel, things are never really ‘okay.’ They’re in a constant state of flux. At best, they’re manageable.”

I needed to transform myself to fit into this corporate environment, and fast.

I studied day and night how to make the transition. How to become a Corporate Guy.

Discovering Code-Switching

The more I studied the transformation ahead, the more intrigued I got. Then I stumbled on a term that jumped off the page: code-switching.

Code-switching means changing how you communicate, behave, and present yourself to fit into a different social or professional environment—essentially speaking the “language” of your new world while suppressing markers from your old one.

The term was coined in the 1950s by linguists studying how people move between languages and dialects. It gained prominence in the 1970s when researchers studied African American students shifting between “standard English” and “African American English.” W.E.B. Du Bois had alluded to the concept a century earlier when he wrote about “double-consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk—navigating dual identities while moving through a world that doesn’t fully accept either.

Over time, it became clear that code-switching applied to many “marginalized” people forced to adapt their language and behavior to fit dominant cultures.

People like me.

I had to learn corporate speak—a polished language that hides what you really mean. You don’t just blurt out what you think. Everything needs a positive spin, even when you’re being verbally attacked or all hell is breaking out.

I remember presenting a new editorial program idea to a small group of Intel managers. About five minutes in, one of them—a senior manager with wire-rimmed glasses and a perpetual smirk—interrupted me.

“Help me understand the ROI here,” he said.

I explained. He didn’t look convinced.

“And the stakeholder alignment?”

I explained again.

We went back and forth for maybe two minutes—me defending, him poking holes. Finally, he held up his hand like a traffic cop.

“Ok. Let’s take this offline.” (a favorite corporate line).

His tone was pleasant. Professional, even. But his piercing blue eyes said something entirely different: What the hell are you talking about?

The meeting moved on. I sat there, face burning, realizing I’d just been publicly dismissed in the politest possible way.

That’s when I understood: In Texas, if someone thought you were full of it, they tell you straight—or settle it with fists. In corporate America, they sucker punch you with a smile and a few choice words, then promise to schedule a meeting you both know will never happen.

As my education continued, I paid special attention to the corporate language. I had to lose any hint of my Texas roots and use the right lingo, like:

Texas: “That dog won’t hunt.”
Corporate: “I don’t believe this strategy will be effective.”

Texas: “This is a shit show.”
Corporate: “We’re experiencing some organizational challenges.”

Texas: “He’s full of it.”
Corporate: “I’d like to see the data supporting his claims.”

Texas: “They threw me under the bus.”
Corporate: “There were some misaligned expectations around accountability.”

New corporate speak constantly emerges. A few years ago, everyone started ‘showing up.’ ‘It’s just how you show up,’ one boss would say. She was an extrovert fireball who made a point of showing up and making sure everyone knew about it. She suggested each of us on the team do the same.

I’d never thought my mere presence mattered that much, but once the language changed, I started ‘showing up’ too.

Living in Limbo

Author Alfred Lubrano captured this perfectly in his book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. As the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer who became a successful journalist, Lubrano wrote about “Straddlers”—those who grow up in blue-collar families but move into white-collar professions.

Straddlers live between two worlds: the working-class culture that values loyalty, hard work, and plain speaking, and the white-collar culture that prizes subtlety, polish, diplomacy, and self-promotion.

We’re often outsiders in both worlds—too refined for our old neighborhoods, yet never fully at ease among our new peers.

A Straddler, Transformed

After my disastrous first performance review, I joined Toastmasters and learned how to speak publicly. That fixed part of the problem. But the cultural adjustment and code-switching was a separate, deeper challenge.

I got rid of the “y’alls” and “you knows.” I cut back on Texas stories. No more tales about night fishing, hunting or rough honky tonks like Mama’s Worry, a favorite local bar in my early days.

I had to become more direct. Tougher. Cut-to-the-chase kind of guy. I had to look more serious, burdened, even. A look just short of paranoid. I learned to challenge even the slightest argument. I was never a “yes, but” kind of guy, but that’s what I had to become.

Never show emotion. Never let them see you sweat—even when my VP of Marketing pulls up my presentation in front of a team of communications managers and says, “Now this is bad.”

I hadn’t been this humiliated since my teen years when JA, the biggest bully in town, knocked me right off my feet into a ditch as my friends looked on in shock.

Smart ass, I thought. I wanted to slap his bald head.

Instead, I said “Sorry to miss the mark, how do you suggest we improve it?”

I had to strengthen my voice. It was too soft, too understated. I practiced regularly at Toastmasters, speaking from my chest with a tone of authority. I tried to channel confidence I didn’t feel.

I was slowly becoming a Corporate Guy.

The trick was making it look natural, as if I actually talked and acted this way.

And here’s the kicker: To effectively code-switch, you can’t switch only some traits and not others. You have to change your entire behavioral profile to convince people that your code-switching behaviors are your “natural behaviors.” Sustaining this performance while completing your actual job can be demanding and exhausting.

Becoming a Corporate Chameleon

I survived. I learned to code-switch, to speak corporate, to challenge and compete. I became a corporate chameleon—a conscious corporate chameleon- aware of what I was trading, actively trying to preserve some core of who I’d been.

But there were costs.

I’d adapted so thoroughly that I couldn’t switch back anymore. The refinery kid was gone. Corporate Guy had taken over. I was caught between two worlds—not quite accepted in Silicon Valley, no longer fitting in Port Neches.

What did I gain? A career. Financial security. The ability to navigate brutal corporate environments. Skills that served me for thirty-five years across multiple tech companies.

What did I lose? My accent. My ease. The ability to just be without performing.

I could do that among close friends, or trips back home to SE Texas.

Soon after my “transformation,” I was relaxing in my mom’s sprawling backyard, sipping her sweet iced tea as we talked about how people climbed the food chain in the tech industry. Towering pine trees swayed in the warm, humid Gulf Coast breeze. Three of my brother’s dusty old cars- clunkers I called them- sat idle, patiently waiting for him to repair them. His white mutt “Dixie” was tied to the circular clothesline, barking its head off at something only it seemed to notice.

When my mom asked if I was stressing myself out at work, I explained, “Some, but it’s how you get ahead in the business world.”

“But what if someone doesn’t want to get ahead?” she said, shooting me a serious look. Her eyes—steady and full of that no-nonsense wisdom only years can bring—held mine with a quiet intensity.

When I hesitated, she shook her head just a little, half amused, half thoughtful.

“It’s just the way it is,” I said. “Tech is Corporate America on steroids.”

“You people will always be OK, at least financially,” she said, the words sounding strange coming from her now that they included me.

“But there’s always a price to pay for those big-shot jobs. Feels kinda like a dog chasing a car down the road—it’s never gonna catch it. I just hope you know what you’re doin’.

By then, I was so deeply entrenched in corporate thinking, her words hit me as a foreign notion. It would take me years to come to grips with the tradeoffs.

What I know now is this: Code-switching and other chameleon moves isn’t about being fake. It’s about survival. And sometimes survival requires becoming someone you barely recognize.

Years later, I made peace with being a straddler. I code-switch as easily as I breathe now—aware of what I’m doing, choosing when to adapt and when to hold the line.

To others navigating this territory: You’re not selling out. You’re surviving. The trick is staying conscious, knowing which parts of yourself are negotiable and which aren’t.

The question boils down to: Who do you want to be in order to be successful? And can you become that person without losing the one you were?