Poor in Tech

What if readers came in, reacted with warmth and kindness and empathy and compassion, and engaged with the article in a way that validated the author's experiences while perhaps gently questioning the article's conclusions? Would that be cold?

Or would the abject failure to reflect when confronted with key truths from the life of a real person make you sick to your stomach?

I noticed it when I moved to the Bay Area after growing up in western New York. The types of foods people ate or didn’t eat, the restaurants people would or would not go to.

The shows people would or would not watch, even the way people talked. I think I hadn’t really seen the difference in class behavior before in America. Now it’s easy to see it.

A lot of it is tightly correlated to wealth and a lot of it reminds me of things the author describes (fear of not being able to find a job, fear of just “taking a year off” because it sounds financially crazy), but it’s not only about wealth really.

You can be poor and still act more “upper class” and you can be rich and still act “working class”. It’s a lot of little things people do in preferences and how they talk/behave.

I don't want people from outside the bubble (e.g. me, three years ago) to read this and think they'll be surrounded by wall-to-wall wankery and class prejudice if they take a job at a SF startup, because it's not wholly representative of all employees at all startups. Most of them are nice. Most people everywhere are nice.

Written differently, but with the same message, it would carry more people with it, but then maybe those that related would relate less well, so maybe that would be a net loss.

My student loans were crushing at one point. Now I require my friends and family to remind me the weight of a 'few thousands'. I feel drawn towards a bubble where I can do opulent activities without guilt. I've heard people say to me "yeah, eventually you just cut off those friends still working at McDonald's". I've never agreed - it takes an arrogant self-realization to agree with such a statement - but I've felt the gradual drift. The article is a good reminder in humility.

I remember one time, when I just started out in tech, I went to an interview for a group that was contracting for NASA, the interview went very well, they loved me, the team loved me. I pretty much had the job. The team liked me so much that they invited me to lunch. I declined, you could tell the temperature changed at that very moment that I did. I did not get the job, and in retrospect I should have just told them I am not in the position to pay for a meal out at this time. I had literally put my last pennies into the tank of my car to get to that interview.

Anyways, I back story that, to say this; I did well in the industry, I have exited a few companies and I have held some pretty impressive titles at some pretty big orgs but I never got rich. Some of that had to do with dragging my family out of poverty but some of it had to do with something else. I helped build a startup and we sold that startup for a good deal of money. I received a pittance because I did not know my value. It was enough to take off some of life's stresses but it was not FU money. I went to work for one of the companies that we had a B2B relationship with that was a downstream provider to the company we sold. Anyways it was here that things changed for me, and it was not because of me or my work. It was because the CEO of that company became my personal friend. Her name was Sheila and she told me something that I had never heard before and that was this.

She told me that I was what she calls institutionally poor. That I had been conditioned thru my childhood to think like a poor person and in doing so you send out unconscious signals to others. She told me this because she came up similar. She told me that it causes you to over analyze and over estimate risk and therefore you will not take the bold moves that people that don't have to worry do. That while you can change the world and everyone see it. If you hold onto the fear on needing your safety net under you, that you will never extract your true value from other. So I said, so you are going to pay me my fair value, she laughed and said no, I got you for a very good deal. 3 Days latter I walked into her office, with my resignation letter and told her I had an offer from another company. She said, now you get it, how much did they offer. I told her, and she said I will double that if you stay. That was when I learned a tangential lesson, and that is sometimes hard ass, ball busters are the best people.

Point being there is a piece of this, that the person that grew up poor has to break themselves free of and many times they don't even know what they need to free themselves of and that is thinking like a poor person.

While I'm sure if I met her in person I'd feel very sympathetic, it is difficult to read about someone being unhappy because they can't take a 3-day holiday in Greece; can't collect antiquities or be driven to work by a chauffeur every day. These are not goals I'm sympathetic with either.

I honestly don't care if someone is poor in relative terms to their co-workers either. I'm only interested in what my coworkers earn in the first place because it strengthens my bargaining position.

If you're not one of the people who typically joins that kind of club you can hack it but you won't feel like you belong or you might but it will take you many years.

Which seems pretty far from the point, but those people could view this as just another attack on their estate. They might feel like they deserve it, and deserve to act that way. This article highlights the ugly side, where someone who isn't already indoctrinated into that elitism is rubbing shoulders with the type who are used to the privilege available to those of us with longer running tech careers. And it looks bad. So in response, I suppose it inspires those people to circle the wagons and just accuse the author or not getting theirs effectively enough.

The time clock thing too! To this day, the back of my mind still wonders if I punched in and whether all my hours are being counted. Can't just walk away from those habits once internalized.

The culture difference is so real. I remember sitting in a meeting with a bunch of managers just a little higher on the totem pole than me. Not executives by any stretch. And they were all complaining about their taxes, the cost of private school for their kids, and the fact that they can't find a good second nanny. I'm just sitting there thinking "If I lose this job, I'm living in my car." Really hard to consider these guys my peers, and I know that affects my work and my working relationship with them.

I mean, the tone of the article is pretty much "me vs them", so is really any surprise that some people would take offense?

The anecdotes range anywhere from caricatures (hot cheetos) to gaffes (cheering over a bonus cheque). What you're implying is that one ought to be empathetic about the OP's struggles w/ "rich person etiquette". But that in itself is a bit tone deaf: it comes across as "first world problems" to those who aren't in the "silicon valley bubble" and it comes across as elitism strawmen to those whose entire careers are in Bay Area tech.

It's kinda like listening to Justin Bieber sing about how lonely he is. It might strictly be true that he struggles w/ loneliness, and it might strictly be true that empathizing with him is "the right thing to do", but it's also strictly true that everyone has a right to not give a rats ass.

The "poor" mindset varies from person to person. Sure there are people that struggle w/ ghetto mindset, but I've had conversations with many people who self-identified as "cheap bastards" (in their own words) who would talk about slowly coming to terms with the fact that they now had decent incomes and disposable money.

Most people will actively avoid it, it just makes their existence harder for no concrete benefit to them.

Food for thought.

Maybe I'm in a weird lucky tech bubble where I've gotten to have a whole career that's mostly devoid of the people she's drawing a contrast against, but I've worked at a pretty disparate variety of jobs, and my experience seems to ring true with a lot of other commenters too.

Maybe I'm just having a kneejerk reaction because the last articles I read this morning were "silicon valley and californians are bad/clueless," and I'm reading that into this when it's not intended subtext.

It's important to be aware that this is a mechanical process. The first comments to appear in a thread are there because they're the fastest to write, not because they come from "the average HN commenter". Another way of putting this is that the initial comments tend to be reflexive rather than reflective: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... (Objecting to objections can be reflexive also, but at least the second wave tends to be more substantive and charitable.)

Reading the list, most of them are pretty harmless if not annoying. But one struck me as something completely different:

> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.

Seaweed Snack vs Cheetos is a class thing, and maybe cultural (I could see people of East-Asians origins reaching for the seaweed more than the Cheetos).

But not being able to get help or mentoring and to network is an enormous barrier to career progression.

Why expect that though? Many of the HN readers are exactly the out-of-touch persons criticized in the article.

This is how the wealthy class really keep people from moving up. Your pay is forever tied to what you used to make. It's hard enough to break the circuit in your mind, it's near impossible to do so with your employer.

At my current employer, they offered me a 10% paycut to convert from contract to FTE. I could not afford that, but I also can't afford to be out of work. I pushed back gently and eventually agreed to converting at the same rate. I knew other people in the same job were making at least $10k more.

The next guy to convert, was able to negotiate harder and I believe he ended up with a higher rate, despite making less then me as a contractor. He used the knowledge of my pay (and my name) to negotiate, which I would never do to someone, since I started at the bottom. This impacted my relationship with my boss.

The company did later give me a pay correction of about 5%, after 2 other team members quit for higher paying jobs. One of whom was making more then me and one who was probably making less.

A lot of the things the author mentioned, I would also do, just because I don't see the point of wasting money if they are offered for free, and saying hello to the cleaning crew is just basic human decency, c'mon.

Also, the paycheck stuff, anyone who has ever cared about money would throw a fit if the money is not in their account the next day, from what I gather all the author's coworkers never had an issue in their life.

It only takes a few trigger words or phrases to take us back to past trauma and difficulties, like the tremors before an earthquake.

I have first-hand experience of the "caste" system that can emerge in tech environments. It was my experience that our colleagues in the lower caste told scare stories (and you see the odd firing/letting go early to feel they are real) and you feel distant from the "upper" caste. But actual factual reality in my specific experience was a basically fair system with strong accountability. I was grateful, and benefitted from the experience overall. It is hard in such environments to "be normal" because the primitive part of the brain is in "fear mode". That part of the brain actually makes the most important decisions in your life.

What is the way through? My opinion is to try and make honest real connection at a human level with your colleagues but that is actually hard to do. That is why the part of the story I found most painful was the comment about "bleached cotton". It was a delicate moment where friendship could have started but was cut off.

Lastly, I thought it was an endearing turn of phrase to first introduce the engineer as someone from Harvard. And then later refer to the person as "Harvard" (instead of the engineer's actual name or some pronoun).

Another thing that I do, is consider the ability to repair tech without lock-in. Being a techie poor teachs you to be careful about this decisions, but people seem perfectly fine to be locked in and just buy new stuff every time.

There has been a lot of time since I don't buy new tech. My phone is second hand, my laptop is a second hand ThinkPad, I have two Eizo Screens that came through ebay, my upgraded desktop has an I5 from ebay, and RAM is probably second hand too, I don't remember.

Honestly, I feel like lots of these are related to being a poorly paid member of the tech company or having work at more working class companies.

When I started out, I literally ate toast for lunch every day because it was provided and I had no other money as time went on I got paid more and I was spending 15-25 every day on lunch. I was spending more on lunch than some people I knew would spend on food for their entire week.

The bonus at my current company was a massive issue for nearly everyone. It was constantly talked about for months because the company screwed up their finances and were talking ages to figure out what the bonus should be. Nearly everyone in my company comes from a middle class background and majority make decent money.

And the thing about the gym is probably on them, the gym is full of people all trying to better themselves and some of the most supportive people you will meet will be the gym. I would routinely tell people they look awesome and I was in awe, I would have random people come up and say well done to me that I was doing well. There are a few people who only want to hang around with other gym rats but 99% are just normal people. I remember talking to a woman who is super hot and even she felt intimidated by the gym.

The thing about stealing is a serious issue for working class companies. So many warehouses for example have security to search employees because they know if they don't lots of their product will walk out of the door with employees. I had friends that would talk about how they stole from their companies. I also heard a bunch of stories of people stealing when a company shut down.

Do you mean the last bit about the Macbook and the headphones, or the bit about the snacks? The snacks were more of a "it is fundamentally impossible to steal cheap stuff because we have infinite cheap stuff, why do you even care that someone took it!" mindset.

She expresses exactly that. She starts each sentence that she realizes that she is poor compared with them. Relative. I do not have the feeling that she even feels miserable about it.

Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

You're right there Obediah.

Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

A cup ' COLD tea.

Without milk or sugar.

OR tea!

In a filthy, cracked cup.

We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, 'Money doesn't buy you happiness.'

'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!

Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

Well when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

Cardboard box?

Aye.

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

Nope, nope..

in my experience, there is no difference in how poor or rich people behave towards low-level staff.

in general, my feeling is the rich are more friendly, but it may be less genuine

That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass.

The social interaction dynamics that happens at the Google building is a reflection of society at large. As another example, I've worked at the offices of charity institutions where the higher level white collar workers ignore the cleaning people. The common theme is that humans in general (and not Google employees specifically) like to stratify people.

I recently flipped through a high school yearbook (these books were more popular before the era of Facebook) and noticed that the cafeteria ladies were relegated to a tiny group photo. However, the teachers got individual portraits. So a public institution funded by taxpayer money implicitly stratified 2 different types of workers. Each page of printing a hardcopy yearbook costs money and the food workers are not the same value to the yearbook staff. See the common pattern across humanity?

Then you see the cleaning staff, and you're confronted with their reality, the fact that they have to do work that is both harder and potentially more useful than what you're doing but they don't get any of the benefits, and they get paid a fraction of what you do, and that just makes you feel even worse, like this entire system is somehow fundamentally broken, which makes you want to trow your ergonomic chair out of the unopenable glass window of your open space.

So it's easier to just look away.

I worked at HQ as an engineer, and didn't notice any such thing.

Most of the time I probably didn't say hi to cleaning staff, for the same reason I wouldn't say hi to most of the people I pass by in the office: because they weren't someone I knew. Of course this might vary depending on context, but I was treating them the same way I treated everyone else, or at least trying to.

Do other people say hi to every single person you see in the building every day?

Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing. One of the most prolific and loved content creators on the internal meme board is in sales. The closest thing I've ever heard like this in the entire valley is that at Apple they don't pay for the lunch bill of non-engineers, so having premium lunch options can feel exclusive to engineers.

One of the most widely praised decisions Google made during the pandemic was to continue to pay their vendor staff who maintain the buildings even though there was no work to be done. And they kept that promise (as far as I can tell) for the entire process even though the initial expectation was that WFH would last for a few months.

My personal experience at Google has been that people do chat with vendor staff like custodial workers and kitchen staff.

This isn't true at all.

Many said that the old man and wife, who built the fortune, were nice humble people that understood that they are so lucky to have made it in life. Many comments also said that their children were absolute spoiled brats who were the exact opposite to humble.

Do they have the information, experience, or responsibility to accurately categorize the specific cultural origin of every single one of those differences? Does it make the argument weaker if they miss a couple? Maybe a little but it's still strong.

Generally they don't like to waste money. That's part of how they stay rich for generations (as opposed to someone who hits the lottery and the next generation is basically back to where they started in many cases).

There's no point being overly defensive about these things. People with all kinds of life experience can learn from each other.

I work as a consultant and I regularly forget to send invoices for a month (sometimes two). It's been years since I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I can afford to skip out on months of income and not notice for day-to-day expenses. And I'm lazy about creating invoices (I should automate this and keep a regular activity log instead of pulling stuff from git and emails but yeah).

More importantly I've worked with other consultants and I got the impression that people from finance are used to chasing them for invoices, so I don't think it's that rare.

So for your generationally wealthy investment bankers, summering at Fishers Island is a necessary conspicuous display of wealth as well a as networking and social process. Eating the office food and using the office pain killers are largely invisible, but to a person obsessed with having money, the costs are accounted for in their personal ledger.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/wealth-can-make-us-se...

But a lot of the article does strike me as stemming from wealth disparity, and is very interesting. Indeed, another thing to add to the list is being unable to distinguish between behaviors that are different because of culture vs. because of wealth.

It's very scavenger-like and I suppose we may lose it if we manage to stay well off long enough, but it definitely colours our decision making even in little things. Being poor definitely stretches beyond the literally financial.

I’m also an immigrant and have never seen such salaries in my life outside of executives so I’m just riding the gravy train. Again, I feel extremely lucky and great to be a part of it. Not beating myself up over having a bigger delta from my childhood than some of my coworkers. Isn’t that the American dream? I would also add that getting McDonalds was the summit of culinary experiences a few times a year when I was growing up. I’m sure people here would find that funny but I’m proud of my life and my background.

I do use an Uber for social calls as it buys me easily 2 hours of my life back as public transport kinda sucks

In fact, as you hint, having been poor and then getting in to the middle class you probably have a better chance of making it big.

Rich kid will thinks they're poor if they're low on petty cash, or if their phone is two years old and has a cracked screen. They never worry that they'll not be able to pay for their phone next month, or have skip a meal to make rent.

I grew up in a well-off-but-frugal household, so I had a lot of the poverty markers listed, but for me they were frugality markers.

The core of poverty isn't the visible markers. Anyone can have those. It's the pervasive stress of not having money, constantly being on the precipice of your life going into a sudden, deep dive. I never had that. Even when I earned ~$13k/year in Americorps, I was fine because I had no debt, I was used to living cheaply, and I knew that if it really came down to it, my parents could help me out. The poor high school students I worked with had the opposite family situation: they'd miss school because family depended on them to help with the bills.

If I ever have kids, I feel like I'll need to go out of my way to ensure they don't grow up segregated into wealthy enclaves. The US is sorted by income--neighborhoods, schools, social circles, and workplaces--and it makes us blind to others' situations. I don't want them to be constantly stressed about money, but it's important to be able to handle financial constraints, and to be aware and understand of the actual reality so many people live with.

[0] https://thedailytexan.com/2019/04/25/median-family-income-of...

Why would you not ask the teacher stuff.

You make it a habit to not make yourself vulnerable to people who consider themselves "your betters". It's a tough habit to break.

Throughout life we always learn from those who are more experienced. Your seniors are there specifically for seeking guidance.

You 100% should have spoken to teachers or tutors throughout school. Their job is to teach you and many of them enjoy sharing their knowledge and seeing someone want to better themsevles by going the extra distance to seek out information outside of the classroom.

Yes, sometimes people do have more important things to do. But no one is going to say "Go away, I don't care, I'm busy". They'll say "can we schedule this for another time?" and then you plan that.

Like, one of the most enjoyable things about my job is teaching other people things that I know and I think they can benefit from. I'll always have time for someone asking me question, it's never a bother. If someone else is blocked on work because they need help then I'll drop what I'm doing to aid them.

As soon as I realized this, I started obsessively drilling their heads for every little scrap (up until the point they would start being annoyed with me). It's free!

Seems to go both ways. Another paragraph described being the lowest paid worker. It seems that they asked her what sort of comp she was expecting, she produced a shockingly low number, and they just accepted the number and moved on. I think that’s basically unethical on the employer’s part. They should have basically ignored what she’d said and offered something they thought was reasonable (obviously that still advantages people who go into the negotiation in a better position, but it doesn’t feel so grossly unfair). Is what they did theft? Strictly speaking no, but it feels no better than any other scam taking advantage of lack of information to get a massive discount. When I was first interviewing for jobs, I asked a friend of mine (in a somewhat related role elsewhere) how much money I should ask for and it’s a good job they never asked me how much I wanted because his estimate was massively below what I was offered.

I think it's fair to say that an SF-based tech startup is a place where you're going to see a lot of these upper class signifiers.

One of the largest issues which would have caused many of the others on the list seems to be that they were absurdly underpaid. So make sure your co-workers aren't making peanuts compared to you?

Telling someone to reflect, for example, is none of those. Instead, tell someone to remember that what people show and what people feel can be different when they assume about another's mental state based on appearances.

> During middle school, I would often skip lunch altogether.

> The first time I went on an out-of-state trip was during college.

> I went snowboarding (for the first time) with some friends a few years ago (age 24) and they didn't even balk at the $500 / night room prices for the all inclusive resort.

> I now feel rich because my car's check engine light is not on.

Ways you can help with this:

* Understand that your coworkers may not have the same experiences as you. If someone tells a joke ("Summering in the Cayman islands" [referencing tax evasion or similar]), perhaps pull them aside later, one on one, and explain why the particular thing was funny.

* Talk about the last book you read. Why was it interesting to you? Poor people and rich people read very different books. Offering insight into whatever issues you read through books might help them have easier conversations with others. For example I'm currently reading "An American sickness" which discusses the rising cost of health care in America. A poor person would focus on why *their* individual healthcare is so expensive, but a rich person looks at the whole system. And that is what this book more or less discusses.

It's not unlike learning a foreign language. Even if you memorize the words and phrases, there's all sorts of ways they are used that can make it difficult to use as a communication tool. Try to identify those odd words or phrases and explain those to others. However this can apply to any company / culture, its not necessarily a rich / poor thing.

It's easier for a friend to come to you with questions - not only about work, but about life in general.

Money can pop up as an excluding factor pretty easily. So, for example, insist on a hard (and low, ideally ridiculously low) upper bound on any expenses associated with optional-but-not-really events like gift exchanges or potluck meals. A company-culture norm of spending higher amounts on such things can cause a lot of stress, even if the amounts are still affordable: ie. figuring out a $25 Secret Santa gift is easier than a $50, much less $75, one.

This article resonates strongly with me. I grew up poor, too, and even though I have a 7 figure net worth now one of the first things I consider for anything is the cost. I don't have to, but I still do. I eat the low rent snacks and I use the company's daily cafeteria allowance to eat a sensible lunch and then take the rest home to share with the family. Being poor in America isn't just about money--it's about the psychological barriers and oppression that are erected.

People inherently trust more the judgement of people they think are rich. If you avoid looking obviously poor, you'll find out that you'd be given better assignments, more freedom, that your mistakes won't be scrutinized as much.

The day you find this out and act accordingly, it is like as if you were black and them suddenly find out you woke white one day. All the invisible barriers, the glass ceiling, are subtly not there anymore.

Yes, like racism, classism sucks. But you have only one life, your time is short, and while we must fight to try to change things, you'd also better be smart and try to work around classism just by not giving obvious clues about you have ever been poor.

The author isn't complaining about that situation. She finds herself being surprised by it, and then noticing her own surprise begins contemplating what it might mean.

I guess it means that poor people are continually treated as if they are thieves or guilty of something, and after being treated that way for so long, you internalize that judgement and treat yourself that way. Then when you notice a situation where you're not being treated that way, you might be surprised, and feel a mixture of emotions about the fact that you have been seeing yourself as guilty and untrustworthy for so long, and for no reason other than that you're poor.

Reading your other comments you seem quite defensive about the fact that she doesn't have any real reason for saying rich people are so bad. But nowhere in the article does she actually say rich people are bad. She's saying why being poor sucks, what it feels like to go from being poor to being a bit better off, what that other world looks like from the outside or, more broadly, how your economic circumstances shape your view of the world and your expectations and interactions in it.

I don't know why you would insist on reading it as some sort of attack.

As someone who used to work in a "lower-class" (and low-pay) tech job (outsourced tech support, but the outsourcing firm was in America) - this is how they treated employees when they resigned (and when they were fired). It resonated with me, and I do not think it's a particularly rare thing in "lower-class" white-collar work.

To be poor in America is to be lesser, not quite human, really. And our society is built from the top down to kindle that as early as possible, and to reinforce it at every stage of life.

That means you’re wealthy now. I grew up fairly poor but with 10+ years in the industry I probably wouldn’t notice a missing paycheck for a while. I’m making 5-10x more than as a teenager. Doesn’t mean I grew up as some kind of an aristocrat

That said, if I were cleaning an office building I don't think I would want everyone chatting me up - just kindly get out of my way when I'm trying to clean something but otherwise I don't see it as rude to not engage with me when I'm doing my job.

I'm not from America and lucked into never needing braces or any dental work at all other than cleanings so I don't know much about this.

No, but culturally soccer is played by middle class white people, not poorer people.

It is relatively cheap in the US as far as I know, but it's not nearly as common as basketball for pickup sports. I think the racial / class connections here are fascinating (and too lengthy to dissect here), but my general sense in the US is that soccer is actually perceived as more "other" / "foreign" than other sports.

> Also the assumption that everyone takes painkillers?

People who come up from lower-class backgrounds often have chronic pain - being overweight is one reason (as alluded to in this article), which is strongly correlated with income/class levels in the US. But also the work that one might do as a lower-class person in the US is different, and tends to be more physically stressful. That can add up to back/knee/neck injuries that never quite heal correctly and cause pain.

Cheap, in terms of money. Expensive, in terms of time. Due to the lack of money to make time available, the poor often have no time for such diversions (even as children, since someone needs to pay the dues and take the child to practice/matches).

Also, if you're like most lower class Americans, you're likely selling your physical labor/wellbeing for a living, making more physical activity after work unappealing.

For those of you too lazy to click through to it here is the text (followed by a bunch of photos of her in different fancy outfits/settings):

Meg Elison: Author & Essayist Meg Elison is a California Bay Area author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards finalist. Her work has been on the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) longlist, nominated for the Audie Award, and won the Philip K. Dick Award. She has also been published in McSweeney’s, Shimmer, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, Terraform, and many other places.

She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and the National Writers Union (@paythewriter).

Her debut novel, "The Book of the Unnamed Midwife" won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, “Find Layla” was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was one of Vanity Fair's Best 15 Books of 2020.

Elison is a high school dropout, a graduate of UC Berkeley, and writes like she’s running out of time.

This assumes, that the motivation for stealing is .... the expectation to get away with it.

What if one of the two parties (rich, poor) has another motivation like... hunger... :-)

Would that scew the statistics ?

How and why do people write these idealist but still obviously false claims, like here: "The rich and poor are just equally (likely to steal)" ?

When I started out I was fairly overweight and completely out of shape, could barely do a couple of pushups, and I felt very uncomfortable and out of place.

However the others just did their programs, and I never got any looks or comments. So after a while I managed to relax and just get on with my own stuff.

When I moved to London I was never able to found a gym with that environment.

Look out for it and you will realize. In my experience, there is always someone who has a very hard life (money or time) and you do not even realize but hurt them without bad intent.

Many people who grew up rich have a natural confidence to them (because they are protected if they lose their job, have been told they'll be someone important one day, given lots of help in life), and that helps a lot in giving a vibe that you'll succeed.

The great thing is that the confidence can be gained even if you didn't grow up in the same circumstances, it just takes more work.

The phrasing was a bit complicated. She realized, she was the only one taking Advil and it was never refilled because only she took from it and she did not empty it.

"Your eating choices" as a poor person might be to eat what and when and where you can afford to.

First, I dont think this accurately describes the list at all. Second, it is ok for people to express negative feelings or observations. Forced positivity is toxic.

Edit: also you seem to present the author's formulation as meaning that they believe poverty caused them to be fat. As far as I can tell she is merely pointing out a series of correlations to both prove that she, in fact, stood out as poor, and to show how this distinction affected her furthermore. Btw I'd say the only actively harmful behaviour from the company she pointed out was making her suggest a salary rather than them making an offering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

This is a great paper I suggest you read: https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/29/1/29/433380 -- this is a good starting point, there are others spanning back the last three decades or so.

It is also worth noting that it's not necessarily how much money you have that is the contributing factor, it can be other factors. The lack of green areas or pathways to walk/exercise (especially prevalent in remote Australian communities), the number of hospitals or doctors close by. But, ultimately, lack of health services and fresh food are correlated to obesity both of which are determined by your location which, in turn, is determined by your financial status.

There are lots of factors why that's the case,but to say it's not happening like this wouldn't be right either.

Sure, there is no law of physics that makes poor people overweight, but it is much easier to have a thin waistline when you have a fat bank account. And indeed we observe that in the US, poor people are heavier than wealthier people.

I think there is a self-deprecating humor to the article, and I enjoyed it. Life in tech world is strange sometimes.

I'm also coming from a poor family and area, and I also had a few revelations, but nothing like this. My very first of these experiences was at a company paid dinner, where the waiters rolled out a trolley of beverages next to our a table and went away for a couple of minutes. I joked to my colleagues at the table that we could just steal that trolley and nobody would notice it. Nobody laughed, of course and I realised that at that point in my life I could buy a truck of those beverages on my hourly wage. That was nearly 3 months into my career and I just moved on right away.

As a matter of fact, not having a lot of money only emphasizes the fact that your health is one of the things you can influence.

They might be right about the bad food options but what these people don't get is that if you're poor you have a lot of bigger more time pressing, more tractable problems to solve than being fat. Most of these people would still be fat if they had more ready access to "good" food because good food wouldn't magically make being fat jump to the top of their priority list.

When you have little money you can very easily justify skipping lunch everyday or something like that. Skipping breakfast or lunch, having a very minimal meal for the one you don't skip (think PB&J, maybe with a fruit cup if you're feeling like a high roller) and then having your big meal at dinner so that your hunger is focused on the parts of the day when you're working and distracted and you go to sleep full is a very, very, tractable form of dieting and cost cutting rolled into one.

But if you have enough money to indulge in food/beer then why not do it, it's about the only luxury you can afford.

EDIT: yeah it probably is, the “bootstraps” quip, pearl clutching joke (followings by the price point bragging), the poke at the benches and mostly the joke about building unaffordable housing give it away, but there’s enough in their not to far away from serious suggestions I’ve read.