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Comment by kaolti | Hacker News Reader

Why is it a lie? Do you disagree that hard work leads to success, within limits?

Hard work only increases the chance for opportunities, to a certain ceiling. It is not, however, the only factor. Or even the most important factor.

Let's use a few sterotypes for examples: A hard working trucker will take years to set aside $10,000 in savings. An average programmer at a financial institution can do the same in months. A debutante able hire a stock broker to invest their slush fund can do the same in hours.

The trucker, in terms of advancement and opportunities, will probably max out at running their own owner-operator business. Maybe they'll get really lucky and be able to employ other drivers as well.

The programmer can probably keep raising their pay by hopping jobs every few years, until they can retire by playing the financial market with his savings.

The debutante just keeps being a debutante.

We could call the trucker the successful one - they ended up with their own business. And there's a cost, too. All of that long haul driving and manual labor moving freight has left them with severe, if managable, back pain. However in terms of capital, in terms of being able to pay for a loved one's fight against cancer, the truck driver isn't even a blip on the radar.

I understand and sympathise with that example. But surely you agree that not all lines of work can be equally compensated.

That doesn't mean that hard work is ineffective and a lie though?

It kinda does. If the "types" of work that get compensated well enough for success are arbitrarily chosen, then that indicates that hard work itself is a lie.

What evidence do you cite that they are arbitrarily chosen?

I think you need to provide evidence that they are not. But for my evidence, I would put forth important positions, like teachers, being grossly underpaid as evidence that they are arbitrarily chosen.

It’s not arbitrary at all. The market sets pricing, it’s not magic. If we fully deregulated education I bet you’d see teacher’s salaries rise. Of course then only the wealthy would get an education but it’s disingenuous to suggest demand and its impact on price is “arbitrary”.

By the market, do you mean the government? Because they set the budget for education, and that budget determines how much money is available to pay teachers with.

Or do you mean the voters, who typically vote down attempts to increase the money for education budgets - typically because most taxpayers don't have children active in education.

There are no market forces at work here whatsoever.

> If we fully deregulated education I bet you’d see teacher’s salaries rise.

One can look at private schools (including universities) and see this is not the case. The pay does increase slightly, but nowhere near proportionally to the value provided. A lot of that extra money provided by private citizens for their children's education is absorbed by bureaucracy (and football).

> The pay does increase slightly, but nowhere near proportionally to the value provided.

Maybe it’s not as valuable as you think it is. If it was, people with means would pay more for it.

Saying "The market sets pricing" is admitting that it's arbitrary.

"If we fully deregulated education I bet you’d see teacher’s salaries rise."

I don't, not by a long shot.

"it’s disingenuous to suggest demand and its impact on price is “arbitrary”."

But that's not what I'm suggesting. Demand for teachers is pretty high. Pay has not risen to meet that demand, however. Demand for software engineers is also high, but only in some places has that demand correlated with a rise in salary.

It is completely arbitrary.

Supply and demand defining price is economics 101. If you’re going to propose an alternative reality, you’re going to have to provide some data to back it up.

And Econ 101 is extremely simplified, due to being an entry level course. Go beyond the freshman level, and you'll find far more nuanced forces at play.

Nuanced != arbitrary

Positing that hard work guarantees anything is the lie. It is a narrative that has been perpetuated by all those who benefit by exploiting hard work.

Smart work ought to be more beneficial than hard work but the narrative focuses on “hard work” with connotations of pushing oneself beyond one’s comfort zone and limits, which implies increased exploit-ability.

It is an immoral statement which left without investigation causes suffering and inequality for many.

Hard work depletes the worker and is therefore ineffective as it creates an imbalance which that person, their family etc. need to pick up. This balance is not reflected by the accounting of the employer so economically it is hard to detect.

Well, no, I'd say that it means that the line of work matters much more than the amount of work put into it.

Between two salesmen in the B2B industry, the amount of work put forward will create a difference in their overall pay. But both salesmen will make more than the hardest working waiter or waitress.

Of course they can. It's a political choice not to.

I recently read Stealing the Corner Office which gives great insight into this. The premise is that incompetent high-level executives exist, so the answer isn't simply hard work.

The author doesn't specifically state it but the problem, at least in my case, is one's definition of work; I don't think I'm alone when I used to think my code spoke for itself and that's that. There are a few problems with that but essentially the issue is many of us myopically ignore other seemingly unimportant work-related tasks such as building relationships, personal marketing (I know that sounds like a buzzword phrase but it's true), among other examples.

Basically, at its core I believe that hard work does lead to success but our definition of work gets in the way.

I would also like to question the definition of “hard”. What does that mean?

Is it like the hard work of someone driven by enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation, in the state of flow? IN my experience that’s the most productive I can ever be. But it doesn’t feel hard at all.

Who and what defines the line where work becomes “hard work” and what is that extra unit worth?

I think it has a lot with the worker pushing beyond what is reasonable and sacrificing other important life aspects and needs they have in order to produce more units of work.

I find this immoral in any structure based on exploitation, which is most structures.

As an absolute, binary statement, yes, because it is not always true, not even close.

Hard work is only one component of success. Physical attractiveness and charisma are often at least as important, even though logically they seem irrelevant. Dealing successfully with humans is often not terribly intuitive.

I don't think anyone is saying they are irrelevant, nothing is black and white. For practical purposes however, hard work does lead to success.

I can think of plenty of people who work way harder than me, and have clearly no path to ever being successful (financially).

You've never known a hard-working person who wasn't successful?

It's moreso that the inverse is true. Not working hard will almost certainly not lead to success (unless your family is rich enough to where you can just "buy" more success). Working hard will not necessarily lead to success, but it's a prerequisite. The amount of work required also depends on what obstacles you're born with and degree of success is desired

I’ve never worked hard in my life and I earn more than my (hard working) parents combined

Careful when making that statement that you don't fall into the trap of believing that only physical labor counts as "hard work".

Front-end engineers who build widgets in React can make a $120,000 salary if they market themselves correctly.

Not all software work is hard work.

I'm going to say most of it that gets paid decently is. You might easily get $120k in the Bay Area, but that's nowhere near a good salary for there.

How would they go about marketing themselves correctly?

Thanks, that's what I was trying to say lol.

I don't think anyone is arguing that there aren't any other factors or that this justifies not helping less fortunate people.

Except for when it doesn't, which is the point.

It depends on who you are. If there are structural factors arrayed against you, less success and more failure will come your way for the same amount of work.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean that "work hard and you'll succeed"is a lie.

I think that the weak claim: "Hard work contributes to success" is supportable but the strong claim "Hard work guarantees success" is not supportable.

Maybe I'm overly logical and can't shake the whole "Necessary and sufficient" aspects of causality [1]. The charitable argument is that working hard can contribute to success but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Necessary_and_suffic...

It’s a half truth at best, which many regard as a kind of lie. Hard work, even smart hard work, is often necessary for success. It’s often not sufficient by itself.

With hard work you can be successful in the sense of being able to afford a basic living or being moderately middle class - which is enough for many people. The deception which looks like a lie to some is in implicating that one percenters got their wealth from hard work - most of them didn't.

AFAIK, statistics show that in industrialized Western countries the wealthy people who are seemingly successful (because of their wealth) have inherited most of their wealth or at least benefited extremely from improved conditions provided by already rich parents. In contrast to this, vertical social mobility remains fairly low and the overall gap between poor & middle class and the richest has been increasing in almost all capitalist Western countries since WW2.

So it's not literally a lie, it's just sometimes kind of dishonest and misleading. In most professions it's practically impossible to get rich from hard work.

   "With hard work you can be successful in the sense of being able to afford a basic living or being moderately middle class"

There is plenty of empirical evidence that this is not really true. One of the pernicious things about the typical American narrative of success is that it often gets used in the contrapositive. This lets people feel good about discounting anyone viewed as "not successful" (whatever definition you want) as having been personally responsible for their own difficulties, so they can be safely ignored.

If you take the fairness out, that phrase is worse than meaningless. It applies to slaves: those who work harder are rewarded to some extent. Does that mean a slave society fulfills the ideals of meritocracy?

If you keep it as it is, it is an absolute statement as in "I can guarantee that every single time any random person works hard, he will be successful after time X" which is clearly empirically false because ignores all the (extremely numerous) boundary conditions.

The problem is exactly that, there are people who think that it is an absolute statement so poor people, unhealthy people, people in bad life conditions, etc are so just because they didn't work hard so they do not deserve any help.

Same reason that a phd isn't really a path to being a tenured professor.

Yes, it is the only way to get a tenured position, but the vast majority of people trying don't get one. And not because they didn't work hard or even because they aren't qualified.

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