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Comment by namelessoracle | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that i had to work harder the lower my position in life was.

The way I was treated, the physical, emotional, and mental toil i suffered were worse at minimum wage jobs than any job i had in IT. The bottom tier of IT has a much worst experience as well compared to development and systems engineering jobs.

It makes me wonder about these people who went to college, then straight into a six figure job out of college claiming to understand how the world works. I can't help but raise my eyebrow at anybody making economic claims and claims about what people should do who have never tried to make rent making below 30k a year in a major American city.

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Fussell calls this out in his Class. A marker of his lower- and mid-Prole and, to some extent, his Middle, classes, are that they're far more highly-surveilled and have much higher expectations for hard work and being on time and things like that than his Upper-Middle (and certainly his Upper).

Lower- and Mid-Prole: piss tests; written up for being five minutes late because there was a car wreck blocking traffic; doctor's note(!) required for a sick day; one week(!) of paid vacation per year.

Upper-middle: Microdosing or just, you know, straight up using illegal drugs with some frequency, possibly openly; "Car broke down, I'm just going to work from home (or take the day off, depending on how upper-middle we're talking) since I can't be in until noon, now, anyway"; "Mental health" days (that may be more "middle", actually—upper-middle may not have any need for the equivocation to placate others, nor ego-driven need to excuse not feeling like working with something quasi-medical); "I think I'll take my sabbatical this year".

(I'd say programmers mostly aren't, class-wise, upper-middle in Fussell's system, purely—they're a broad mix of upper-prole, middle [lots of middle], and upper-middle, according to the class privileges they enjoy and the norms that tend to be instilled in or brought to the table by programmers, and the mix of those varies a lot by industry and region)

Hard seconding Fussell's Class. Some of the specifics around signaling have changed in the past few decades since it was written (a lot being more the whims of fashion trends than anything else), but if anything the societal bands outlined have more clearly striated since then.

I'd love something more recent that treated the same subject anywhere close to as well. The near-contemporary and somewhat-related The Official Preppy Handbook received a sequel some years ago, but it's lazy crap with none of the insight or wry humor of the original. Awful little scrap-book that got published based on the reputation (and sales figures, I'm sure) of the original. Very disappointing.

The lower you are in the organization the more work you are likely doing and the less flexibility you have.

As you ascend the organizational ladder what matters is your ability to organize and motivate others, relationship building and communication skills, and your general vision / insights / experience.

The above means that you can be pretty lazy later in your career if you are just highly competent at those things. If you are hard working it certainly helps, but give me a lazy but competent and fair leader over a hard working incompetent one any day.

However for bottom of the org chart employees hard work and accuracy of work are most valued.

I don't disagree with your general take although it matters what sort of higher-level position. It's true that a senior individual contributor can potentially cruise if they can churn out quality work quickly. But senior execs mostly work pretty hard, (normally) a ton of travel, lots of calls at all hours of the day and night, etc.

ADDED: Not sure why people disagree with this. Yes, those senior execs are well-paid (some would say excessively paid at the largest companies) for their hard (as in long hours/stress) work, but it doesn't mean they're just taking it easy.

I agree. It is a different type of work, but it is a lot of work nonetheless. There is a greater degree of flexibility afforded to executives and many consider the actual work much more desirable. I think many have trouble understanding the value that a good executive brings and seeing the types of work that they do as "real."

Yeah, as a senior IC, I have a lot of flexibility compared to an exec who probably has most of their day scheduled including late night calls. And I fully appreciate this when I'm on a "road trip" of some sort when I'm pretty much scheduled from breakfast through post-dinner.

And sure, a senior exec has freedom to say that this AM doesn't work for me--reschedule things. But there are still a lot of meetings/calls at odd hours.

I think most people have this weird idea that execs don't actually do anything and their job is ridiculously easy.

If you are a manager and work hard then you are doing a bad job. A good manager will make sure that his team has the skills and autonomy to make the right decisions without constantly involving him/her. Leaving the manager to focus on identifying and improving the current bottleneck (Theory of Constraints style).

I mostly agree with you but I do think you’re missing the most important piece: who has power and leverage.

Low level employees don’t have much power (in the US at least) so they’re overworked and underpaid. Senior leadership are literally the people who make the rules, so they’re not going to force the same degrading conditions on themselves as they put on low level workers.

Then there’s something like the cushy engineering jobs some of us have in SV, that’s because they have power in the form of a labor shortage and can demand good working conditions.

> ...have power in the form of a labor shortage...

It can be much more than this. A short order cook might prepare $1,500 worth of food in a shift. $30,000 in a month. It's hard work in a busy diner.

As an extreme example, at one point, WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. That's 10,000,000 users per engineer. If a user was worth $1/month, they were each responsible for $10,000,000 per month in revenue.

That's an extreme, but even at my company, for example, one engineer is responsible for about $200,000/month in revenue.

I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive.

If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged.

Edited for clarity

What does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism?

You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.

I think that OP just means that capitalism, as a system, has absolutely no incentive to increase wages as productivity increases, it's a race for profits so extracting maximum profit is the metric. It's this reliance on a single metric that, for me personally, is a major failure of the current economic system to provide not only wealth and innovation but also good standards of living for people.

I'm a bit of a humanist and quite leftist in my views though, not a communist by any means but I will always try to look into economic systems with this more humane optic.

The problem is you can pull any old programmer in off the streets to work on the stuff that brings in 200k/mo per person, so I'm doubtful there will be a surplus of engineering talent at the desired skill level.

Generally, I agree you. In engineering orgs, it seems like the social dynamics of the org distribute who is perceived to be creating that value in a non-average way. e.g. the engineers improving reliability are probably perceived as less valuable than engineers putting out user visible changes. This seems to be what happens by default, unless leadership is self-aware enough to mitigate.

Attributing revenue to the short order cook is a lot easier than the engineer. (Sales people are also easier to quantify.)

No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis.

The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.

CEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.

That’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.

Nope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.

What can I tell you? You work around bad managers, not “typical” managers, IME. The typical productive ops middle manager is a pretty stressed out animal or left on the side of the road, the typical senior ops manager has an easier daily life punctuated by episodes of challenging and rewarding hardships. Good managers _are_ hard to find relative to good individual contributors. On that we agree. Most individual contributors who think they want to be managers quickly find out it’s not an easy or fake job - it’s a damn hard job to do correctly. Bad managers beget bad junior managers, but that’s rarely sustainable in the long term for an organization, again IME.

That has also been my experience.

When I was 16, I cleaned dishes in a restaurant for a few weeks, for a few hundred bucks total. That was the most exhausting job I ever had, and the other folks there didn’t treat me respectfully at all. Cheap lighting, standing upright all day, handling _huge_ pots that the cook burnt („There, I made an oopsie, clean this up before you go“) - I can’t recommend that. I was not supposed to be in contact with customers either, so didn’t even get to know anybody. If you‘d press me to find anything good about that job, it’s probably that I can now appreciate the hard work many people have to do in order to make rent.

Compare that to my freelance iOS dev job where my worst complaint is that I sit in too many meetings.

Same. As a teenager I was on my feet all day as a server and bused my own tables as well. It was exhausting then and I was an athlete.

Work hard when you are young so you can be lazy later if you want. Maybe you will always work hard because you like it, but give yourself the option.

> Work hard when you are young so you can be lazy later if you want. Maybe you will always work hard because you like it, but give yourself the option.

Great advice. Start really early with honors/AP English classes and you might not even have to work that hard at all. Nothing teaches you to bullshit your way to success better than high school literature classes, which is a critical skill for lazy but productive engineers/managers who need to communicate their contributions instead of prostrating "work ethic."

Hard agree. I will never have a job as hard as the summers I spent working food service or cleaning pools. You had to be on your feet all day for pennies, working fast to handle annoying customers.

Software is no comparison. You get to sit in a nice chair and listen to music all day while you essentially do puzzles.

Same, as I've been paid more and given more responsibilities, the more allowances have been given to me wrt how my work gets done, and a greater emphasis is placed on my comfort particularly over the long term. The way I've ended up modeling it is as power relationships. The same power relationship that lets an employer get away with paying someone minimum wage or close to it, also lets them figuratively crack the whip and literally destroy the bodies of these workers over the period they work. That power relationship is a much more predictive model IMO than value of work done if you have to pick one model (although economics is always an amalgamation of models in the real life and picking just one model to describe every situation is always a mistake).

Literally the hardest worker I've ever worked with was working for under minimum wage (Georgia at that time refused to enforce the federal minimum wage) until his boss lied to .gov to get that worker's refugee status revoked (saying to us later "you should thank me for getting rid of another mexican taking your jobs"). I think that worker is now in a prison in a Central American country (I want to say El Salvador?) on trumped up political charges that he was escaping. It's hard to get a better lesson that simply hard work is not enough to succeed in America.

I think the core discrepancy between people's experiences and beliefs on this subject is the meaning of 'hard' in 'work hard'.

If you take that to mean 'applying effort' then even in the most ideal meritocracy that would decouple from success, because where the effort goes matters.

I think the big difference in perspective between the kids who popped out of school at 6 figures and the people who spent a few years slaving away at 30k a year, is the assumption of maximally directing one's effort.

People who make 30k a year have likely made many attempts to direct their effort productively, and gotten little return. Kids who pop out of college making plenty of money, have likely made very few attempts to productively direct their effort, but have had enormous return.

I think this causes a difference in the perceived difficulty of accessing a productive outlet for effort. The prior assumes access is hard, meaning most effort is likely to be wasted, while the latter assumes access is easy, meany most effort ends up being productive to one's own success.

100% agree, my non-tech jobs I worked were horrible, I had a manager scream in my face and throw stuff onto the floor for a messy shelf(retail job I worked at a bit before college). I then worked at a lower level IT job where the the manager called all the workers sh!theads and then insulted us further while we were all in a meeting.

Contrast that with having coworkers now(work at a FANG equivalent) who went straight from prep school to ivy league(or stanford etc) and who have no comprehension of how a vast majority of the country deals with jobs or bosses, they think catered lunches/breakfasts are the norm and free massages are at all jobs.

IANAL, but habitually screaming at and insulting employees sounds like textbook harassment/bullying. I suppose this sort of criminality is less likely to be reported in more precarious employment situations.

As a data point, I have worked a lot of (so-called) blue collar jobs over the years, from stacking shelves to washing pots to serving drinks to digging ditches, and I never had a problem with a bully or a disrespectful boss. I have now been working as a software engineer for 10 years and one of my more recent bosses refused to call me by my name for several months and instead referred to me as "dickhead" or "you Irish bastard" and was known to jab his finger in people's faces and yell "fuck you" when he lost his temper. Assholes are assholes, no matter what your job title.

(but I certainly agree that lower-paid jobs are a lot tougher; even if the wages were the same, I wouldn't go back to any of the jobs I did before software)

I think retail encourages this type of behavior by having large numbers of unskilled workers all fighting for the small amount of decent paying positions, and then topping that off with paper thin profit margins due to business decisions made up higher, this leads to abusive managers floating to the top (of store management, district and regional management) as fear is a good way to get the troops inline and carry out the home offices orders. In addition job prospects of a retail front line worker are usually slim.

> It makes me wonder about these people who went to college, then straight into a six figure job out of college claiming to understand how the world works.

This is a very small percentage of people, and also a very small percentage of college graduates [1].

And even then many of those would have subsisted on a shoestring while in college.

1. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/average-sala...

I often have to remind myself about these stats after reading several comment threads on HN

And yet i seem to run into them again and again in this industry. And FAANG has hiring pipelines designed to grab these people.

Also i kind of doubt the schools that FANG hires straight of have student populations that have the same definition of shoestring budget as a normal person.

> And yet i seem to run into them again and again in this industry.

Well, for one thing, Your anecdotal encounters cannot possibly represent most college graduates.

Furthermore, most college graduates do not work in this industry, much less at FAANG companies.

There's hard work and then there's hard work.

There's work that's hard on your body, but is simple to do.

Then there's work that's easy on your body, but is difficult to do.

(Also, easy on the body/simple, and hard on your body and difficult, but in this case, they're not relevant)

Running cable, carting machines, and all the other stuff done by the bottom tier of IT is stuff more people are capable of doing. It's simpler. Designing the network, the software, etc is more difficult, not everyone can do it.

And those people who went to college then straight into a six figure job do know how the world works. Or at least a part of it. Because that's how it worked for them. It did work. They were not wrong.

They don't know how every part of the world works, though. And neither does the person who makes 30k a year in major American cities. They know how that part works.

Logically speaking then the person who did the 30k dance and then went to school and got a job making 6 plus figures know more than either of those groups?

And there's more than two experiences in this world.

Not to mention, the person who did one then the other knew what it was like to do "the 30k dance" then which could be very different than doing it today.

All software devs should work in QA for a bit to understand that in a real sense.

Or: don’t have QA at all and make sure devs speak to the user

this is an excellent exercise in empathy, plus you get more useful developers

I believe this misses the point, as does the article. The "American Dream" was never about blindly working harder on the same things in order to achieve a state where you no longer have to work.

The dream is that through bettering yourself (education, skills), applying yourself to the myriad opportunities in our society (Business, religious, NGO, etc), you can find a niche in which you excel and create a better standard of living for yourself and your children.

This matches my experience as well. "hard work" isn't just the hours: it's also the mental and physical toll. White collar grinding is easy by comparison.

I am glad to know that I am not the only person who felt this way - I have experienced similar.

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