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Comment by praccu | Hacker News Reader

It's really true, though. It's brutal, ugly work with no hope of an end.

Edit: Favorite paper on the topic: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html

So is the work that doctors, lawyers, and other highly-skilled people do, by and large. Everyone knows that day-to-day aspects of these jobs are hardly glamorous (or even cerebral), the vast majority of the time. Yet somehow we manage to accord these people with their due degree of respect, and wouldn't think of referring to them as "janitors".

I don't see what's so bad about janitors, though. They do very thankless jobs for not much money, whereas doctors and lawyers and other high-skilled individuals are often well renumerated or offered certain social prestige that your post shows is quite lacking when a humble janitor is considered.

A perfectly valid point. But getting back to the original article -- it pretty much takes a SV alpha-nerd (or aspiring CEO seeking to cater to them) to come up with language like that.

There's nothing wrong with janitors, but the work they do can be done by any dumb monkey with almost no training. That's why the pay is so low for the job: anyone can do it, as long as they can lift trash cans and push a vacuum cleaner.

Plumbers are entirely different. They have to get their hands dirty working on some awful systems, but they actually have to know what they're doing, get specialized training, etc. Soldering a proper joint with copper pipes isn't that easy, and if you screw it up, it'll leak later and cause a lot of property damage. Knowing which pipes and fittings to use where is specialized knowledge. It's not something you can just grab someone off the street and train them to do in 30 minutes. Of course, plumbers also cost a lot too, and the ones who are self-employed (rather than their assistants) generally do pretty well financially.

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