> Seriously, if you're my boss and you yell at me, my resume is being updated that night and I'm going to shop it around.
Yell at him once and he's gone. Note: I didn't say you will get yelled at a lot or even often but it will happen.
If you pack your bags the first time you get yelled at well that's a pretty good argument that you should be yelled at sooner rather than later to see what you're made of.
He's not talking about conflict. He's talking about yelling, which is a monkey dominance game for someone who has lost interest in finding the right answer. It's just a hair below shoving on the "cannot control himself, belongs in a cage" scale of warning signs.
What am I made of? I'm a human being, not a slave, so I demand zero tolerance for this in any workplace.
And the relationship analogy still applies: sure most (hopefully) conflict isn't settled more amicably but tempers do blow up and things get said in the heat of the moment. Expecting that to never happen makes you look thin-skinned, naive or both.
I think it can be expected in a professional setting in the US. Given your line of thinking, almost any behavior can be excused.
I'll also add that it depends on the expectation of the job when you applied. Normal white collar work in the US usually doesn't entail being yelled at. Being a football player does. So does signing up to be a Marine.
I've been in a relationship for two years that hasn't involved any yelling. The year-long relationship I had before that didn't involve any yelling. The 1.5 year relationship before that was mostly long-distance, but didn't involve any yelling, either. The one before that had some yelling in it, and I found it unpleasant enough to avoid yell-prone relatioships from that point forward.
I'd be happy to be filtered out by that criterion if my employer thought that was an important filter to test for. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1233385 for an admittedly biased description of the person you've just decided you didn't want in your organization.
As for whether yelling happens, of course it does. But not bloody often in healthy organizations. I think I've been yelled at by 3 people in the workplace in the last decade. None of whom I reported to. One of whom apologized fairly rapidly. I accepted it - he had a lot of other stuff going on in his life. The others my manager arranged buffers with so I wouldn't need to have interactions.
In the same period I've yelled at 2. Once at a social event when someone dumped water on me without checking whether I had electronics I cared about on my person. (As soon as the shock passed I apologized for yelling, and the other person apologized about my cellphone. Which luckily was not harmed.) The other case involved someone who physically hit me without provocation or warning. (He had mental problems which I had not known about.)
If your average is significantly worse than that, I suspect you have an issue that is worth looking into.
> Seriously, if you're my boss and you yell at me, my resume is being updated that night and I'm going to shop it around.
Yell at him once and he's gone. Note: I didn't say you will get yelled at a lot or even often but it will happen.
If you pack your bags the first time you get yelled at well that's a pretty good argument that you should be yelled at sooner rather than later to see what you're made of.
Consider it a filter.