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Comment by 60654 | Hacker News Reader

> Most people aren’t in tech or law or teaching in universities; they fall solidly in what is called working-class. They work as electricians, carpenters, plumbers, in hospitals, restaurants, as clerks, office managers, farmers, etc.

I'm surprised that he's surprised by this. Even in SV you can have a reality check, if you just deign to strike up a conversation with the cooks and the bus drivers and the janitors who work all around you. No need to take a road trip to the summer house to have this epiphany, just open your eyes.

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He's not surprised. The point is that SV culture is designed around intentionally obfuscating people who aren't in tech or law or academia behind apps and services.

Yes, obviously, those people live and work in parts of SV, just like anywhere else. But SV is built around not having to see or interact them as human beings who have lives and problems outside of the narrowly scoped tasks people in the bubble hired them to perform. Thus the entire bubble metaphor that was the point of the article.

The author doesn't express surprise at this. The quotation and surrounding text are just a dispassionate description, probably intended for people (unlike the author) who rarely if ever step outside the sv bubble.

Which part made you think this was an "epiphany" fit the author?

The author expresses that they meet the people in a different context. Sure, you see bus drivers doing their job, but you're not talking with them about life while they're at the wheel.

In the tech bubble, chances are that the cook and the bus driver and the janitor just works there - they don't live there (because they can't afford it), they don't go to diners and pubs there much, it's as if they live in a different society that just "visits" that world during work. In the semi-rural area, they were part of the same society, in the tech bubble they're two separate societies increasingly growing apart from each other.

Additional idea: do some volunteering outside of the tech industry.

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