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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of people on HN grew up in wealthier families, and perhaps never had to work a manual labor job.

Speak for yourself. I find this offensive. But maybe you are right since a large number of people here have upvoted this to be top post.

> If the average worker lifts 100 boxes per day, you just have to lift 100 boxes and you know you are doing the work correctly. You deserve to be there.

Deserve to be there? Wow. I won't say what I am really thinking right now. I think I'll go have a few beers and hope I calm down. Hopefully some day you will talk this trash to us in person rather than anonymously on some board.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14685423 and marked it off-topic.

Whoa, what? I don't think this comment meant anything negative to people from blue-collar backgrounds, and I think when it reads "deserve to be there" that--you might be reading that as "don't deserve anything better than that", but I think the context implied that what was meant was "shouldn't feel like you're a fraud at box-lifting and thus don't deserve to be doing the work you're doing". My family's blue-collar AF, but I don't think there's anything offensive about noting that a field that widely requires college degrees (these days) is going to be populated largely by the classes of people who get college degrees (for whatever reasons such class divisions exist). "Wealthier" doesn't even necessarily mean anything above middle class, in context.

The question was about “impostor syndrome”. The implication that the OP feels like he doesn’t really “deserve” to be where he is is right there in the name.

Nobody said that he was justified in such a belief. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: “Impostor syndrome is a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”

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